To Those Who Fel

The Battle of the Tenaru, August 21, 1942
by Robert Leckie
A helmet for my pil ow,
A poncho for my bed,
My rifle rests across my chest—
The stars swing overhead.
The whisper of the kunai,
The murmur of the sea,
The sighing palm and night so calm
Betray no enemy.
Hear!, river bank so silent
You men who sleep around
That foreign scream across the stream—
Up! Fire at the sound!
Sweeping over the sandspit
That blocks the Tenaru
With Banzai-boast a mushroomed host
Vows to destroy our few.
Into your holes and gunpits!
Kil them with rifles and knives!
Feed them with lead until they are dead— And widowed are their wives.
Sons of the mothers who gave you
Honor and gift of birth,
Strike with the knife til blood and life Run out upon the earth.
Marines, keep faith with your glory
Keep to your trembling hole.
Intruder feel of Nippon steel
Can’t penetrate your soul.
Closing, they charge al howling
Their breasts al targets large.
The gun must shake, the bul ets make
A slaughter of their charge.
Red are the flashing tracers,
Yel ow the bursting shel s.
Hoarse is the cry of men who die
Shril are the woundeds’ yel s.
God, how the night reels stricken!
She shrieks with orange spark.
The mortar’s lash and cannon’s crash
Have crucified the dark.
Fal ing, the faltering foemen
Beneath our guns lie heaped.
By greenish glare of rocket’s flare
We see the harvest reaped.
Now has the first fierce onslaught
Been broken and hurled back.
Hammered and hit, from hole and pit—
We rise up to attack!
Day bursts pale from a gun tube,
The gibbering night has fled.
By light of dawn the foe has drawn
A line behind his dead.
Our tanks clank in behind him,
Our riflemen move out.
Their hearts have met our bayonet—
It’s ended with a shout.

“Cease fire!”—the words go ringing,
Over the heaps of the slain.
The battle’s won, the Rising Sun
Lies riddled on the plain.
St. Michael, angel of battle,
We praise you to God on high.
The foe you gave was strong and brave
And unafraid to die.
Speak to The Lord for our comrades,
Kil ed when the battle seemed lost.
They went to meet a bright defeat—
The hero’s holocaust.
False is the vaunt of the victor,
Empty our living pride.
For those who fel there is no hel —
Not for the brave who died.

1
A cutting wind slanted up Church Street in the cheerless dawn of January 5, 1942. That day I departed for the United States Marines. The war with Japan was not yet four weeks old, Wake Island had fal en. Pearl Harbor was a real tragedy, a burning bitter humiliation. Hastily composed war songs were on the lips of everyone, their heavy patriotism failing to compensate for what they lacked in tune and spirit. Hysteria seemed to crouch behind al eyes.
But none of this meant much to me. I was aware of my father beside me, bending into the wind with me. I could feel the wound in my lower regions, stil fresh, stil sore. The sutures had been removed a few days earlier. I had sought to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor, but the Marines had insisted that I be circumcised. It cost me a hundred dol ars, although I am not sure to this day whether I paid the doctor or not. But I am certain that few young men went off to war in that fateful time so marked. We had come across the Jersey meadows, riding the Erie commuter line, and then on the ferry over the Hudson River to downtown New York. Breakfast at home had been subdued. My mother was up and about; she did not cry. It was not a heart-rending leave-taking, nor was it brave, resolute —any of those words that fail to describe the thing. It was like so much else in this war that was to produce unbounded heroism, yet not a single stirring song: it was resigned. She fol owed me to the door with sad eyes and said, “God keep you.”
It had been a silent trip across the meadows and it was a wordless good-by in front of the bronze revolving doors at Ninety, Church Street. My father embraced me quickly, and just as quickly averted his face and left. The Irish doorman measured me and smiled. I went inside and joined the United States Marines. The captain who swore us in reduced the ceremony to a jumble. We al held up our hands. We put them down when he lowered his. That way we guessed we were marines.
The master gunnery sergeant who became our momentary shepherd made the fact plainer to us. Those rich mel ow blasphemous oaths that were to become so familiar to me flowed from his lips with the consummate ease of one who had spent a lifetime in vituperation. I would meet his masters later. Presently, as he herded us across the river to Hoboken and a waiting train, he seemed to be beyond comparison. But he was gentle and kind enough when he said good-by to the thirty or forty of us who boarded the train. He stood at the head of our railroad car—a man of middle age, slender, and of a grace that was on the verge of being ruined by a pot bel y. He wore the Marine dress blues. Over this was the regulation tight-fitting overcoat of forest green. Green and blue has always seemed to me an odd combination of colors, and it seemed especial y so then; the gaudy dark and light blue of the Marine dress sheathed in sedate and soothing green. “Where you are going it wil not be easy,” the gunnery sergeant said. “When you get to Parris Island, you’l find things plenty different from civilian life. You won’t like it! You’l think they’re overdoing things. You’l think they’re stupid! You’l think they’re the cruelest, rottenest bunch of men you ever ran into! I’m going to tel you one thing. You’l be wrong! If you want to save yourself plenty of heartache you’l listen to me right now: you’l do everything they tel you and you’l keep your big mouths shut!”
He could not help grinning at the end. No group of men ever had a saner counselor, and he knew it; but he could not help grinning. He knew we would ignore his every word.
“Okay, Sarge,” somebody yel ed. “Thanks, Sarge.” He turned and left us.
We cal ed him “Sarge.” Within another twenty-four hours we would not dare address a lowly Pfc. without the cringing “sir.” But today the civilian shine was stil upon us. We wore civvies; Hoboken howled around us in the throes of trade; we each had the citizen’s polite deprecation of the soldier, and who among us was not certain that he was not long for the ranks? Our ride to Washington was silent and uneventful. But once we had arrived in the capital and had changed trains the atmosphere seemed to lift. Other Marine recruits were arriving from al over the east. Our contingent was the last to arrive, the last to be crammed aboard the ancient wooden train that waited, puffing, dirty-in-the-dark, smel ing of coal—waited to take us down the coast to South Carolina. Perhaps it was because of the dilapidated old train that we brightened and became gay. Such a dingy, tired old relic could not help but provoke mirth. Someone pretended to have found a brass plate beneath one of the seats, and our car rocked with laughter as he read, “This car is the property of the Philadelphia Museum of American History.” We had light from kerosene lamps and heat from a potbel ied stove. Draughts seemed to stream from every angle and there was a constant creaking and wailing of wood and wheels that sounded like an endless keening. Strange old train that it was, I loved it. Comfort had been left behind in Washington. Some of us already were beginning to revel in the hardship of the train ride. That intangible mystique of the marine was somehow, even then, at work. We were having it rough, which is exactly what we expected and what we had signed up for. That is the thing: having it rough. The man who has had it roughest is the man to be most admired. Conversely, he who has had it the easiest is the least praiseworthy.
Those who wished to sleep could cat-nap on the floor while the train lurched down through Virginia and North Carolina. But these were few. The singing and the talk were too exciting.
The boy sitting next to me—a handsome blond-haired youth from south Jersey—turned out to have a fine high voice. He sang several songs alone. There being a liberal leavening of New York Irish among us, he was soon singing Irish bal ads. Across the aisle there was another boy, whom I shal cal Armadil o because of his lean and pointed face. He was from New York and had attended col ege there. Being one of the few col ege men present, he had already established a sort of literary clique. The Armadil o’s coterie could not equal another circle farther down the car. This had at its center a stocky, smiling redhead. Red had been a catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and had once hit a home run at the Polo Grounds off the great Carl Hubbel . There was no measuring the impact of such a celebrity on our group, composed otherwise of mediocrities like myself. Red had been in the big time. He had held daily converse with men who were nothing less than the idols of his newfound comrades. It was quite natural they should ring him round; consult him on everything from pitching form to the Japanese General Staff. “Whaddya think it’l be like at Parris Island, Red?” “Hey, Red—you think the Japs are as tough as the newspapers say they are?” It is an American weakness. The success becomes the sage. Scientists counsel on civil liberty; comedians and actresses lead political ral ies; athletes tel us what brand of cigarette to smoke. But the redhead was equal to it. It was plain in his case what travel and headlines can do. He was easily the most poised of us al .
But I suspect even Red’s savoir-faire got a rude jolt when we arrived in Parris Island. We had been taken from the railroad station by truck. When we had dismounted and had formed a motley rank in front of the red brick mess hal , we were subjected to the classic greeting. “Boys,” said the sergeant who would be our dril instructor. “Boys—Ah want to tel yawl something. Give youah hearts to Jesus, boys—’cause youah ass

belongs to me!”
Then he fel us in after our clumsy civilian fashion and marched us into the mess hal . There were baloney and lima beans. I had never eaten lima beans before, but I did this time; they were cold. The group that had made the trip from New York did not survive the first day in Parris Island. I never saw the blond singer again, nor most of the others. Somehow sixty of us, among the hundreds who had been aboard that ancient train, became a training platoon, were assigned a number and placed under the charge of the dril sergeant who had delivered the welcoming address. Sergeant Bel ow was a southerner with a fine contempt for northerners. It was not that he favored the southerners; he merely treated them less sarcastical y. He was big. I would say six feet four inches, two hundred thirty pounds. But above al he had a voice.
It pulsed with power as he counted the cadence, marching us from the administration building to the quartermaster’s. It whipped us, this ragged remnant, and stiffened our slouching civilian backs. Nowhere else but in the Marine Corps do you hear that peculiar lilting cadence of command. “Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.” It sounds like an incantation; but it is merely the traditional “three-four-your-left” elongated by the southern drawl, made sprightly by being sung. I never heard it done better than by our sergeant. Because of this, and because of his inordinate love of dril , I have but one image of him: striding stiff-backed a few feet apart from us, arms thrust out, hands clenched, head canted back, with the whole body fol owing and the great voice ceaselessly bel owing, “Thrip-faw-ya-leahft, thrip-faw-ya-leahft.” Sergeant Bel ow marched us to the quartermaster’s. It was there we were stripped of al vestiges of personality. It is the quartermasters who make soldiers, sailors and marines. In their presence, one strips down. With each divestment, a trait is lost; the discard of a garment marks the quiet death of an idiosyncrasy. I take off my socks; gone is a propensity for stripes, or clocks, or checks, or even solids; ended is a tendency to combine purple socks with brown tie. My socks henceforth wil be tan. They wil neither be soiled, nor rol ed, nor gaudy, nor restrained, nor holey. They wil be tan. The only other thing they may be is clean.
So it is with it al , until one stands naked, struggling with an embarrassment that is entirely lost on the laconic shades who work in quartermaster sheds. Within—in the depths the psychiatrists cal subliminal—a human spark stil sputters. It wil never go quite out. Its vigor or its desuetude is in exact proportion to the number of miles a man may put between himself and his camp. Thus naked, thus quivering, a man is defenseless before the quartermaster. Character clings to clothes that have gone into the discard, as skin and hair stick to adhesive tape. It is torn from you. Then the quartermaster shades swarm over you with measuring tape. A cascade of clothes fal s upon you, washing you clean of personality. It is as though some monstrous cornucopia poised in the air above has been tilted; and a rain of caps, gloves, socks, shoes, underwear, shirts, belts, pants, coats fal s upon your unfortunate head. When you have emerged from this, you are but a number: 351391 USMCR. Twenty minutes before, there had stood in your place a human being, surrounded by some sixty other human beings. But now there stood one number among some sixty others: the sum of al to be a training platoon, but the parts to have no meaning except in the context of the whole. We looked alike, as Chinese seem to Westerners and, I suppose, vice versa. The color and cut of our hair stil saved us. But in a minute these too would fal .
The cry rose as we marched to the barbers: “You’l be sorree!” Before the last syl able of the taunt had died away, the barber had sheared me. I think he needed four, perhaps five, strokes with his electric clipper. The last stroke completed the circle. I was now a number encased in khaki and encompassed by chaos.
And it was the second of these twin denominators of Parris Island that was the real operative thing. In six weeks of training there seemed not to exist a single pattern—apart from meals. Al seemed chaos: marching, dril ing in the manual of arms; listening to lectures on military courtesy—“In saluting, the right hand wil strike the head at a forty-five-degree angle midway of the right eye;” listening to lectures on marine jargon—“From now on everything, floor, street, ground, everything is ‘the deck;’” cleaning and polishing one’s rifle until it shone like an ornament; shaving daily whether hairy or beardless. It was al a jumble.
“Whadda we gonna do—salute the Japs to death?” “No, we’re gonna blind them with spit and polish.” “Yeah—or barber the bastards.”
Al the logic seemed to be on our side. The Marine Corps seemed a madness. They had quartered us on the second floor of a wooden barracks and they kept us there. Save for a week or so on the rifle range and Sunday Masses, I never stirred from that barracks but at the beck of Sergeant Bel ow. We had no privileges. We were half-baked; no longer civilians, just becoming marines. We were like St. Augustine’s definition of time: “Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer is.” And always the marching.
March to the mess hal , march to the sick bay, march to draw rifles slimy with cosmoline, march to the water racks to scrub them clean, march to the marching ground. Feet slapping cement, treading the packed earth, grinding to a halt with rifle butts clashing. “To the rear, march! … Forrr-ward, march! … Left oblique, march! … Platoon, halt!” … clash, clash … “Right shouldeh, ahms!”… slap, slap … my finger! my red and white finger … “Goddammit, men! Strike youah pieces! Hear me? Strike youah pieces, y’hear? Ah want noise! Ah want blood! Noise! Blood! Pre-sent, ahms!” … my finger! … “Forrr- ward, march!” … now again … march, march, march … It was a madness.
But it was discipline.
Apart from us recruits, no one in Parris Island seemed to care for anything but discipline. There was absolutely no talk of the war; we heard no fiery lectures about kil ing Japs, such as we were to hear later on in New River. Everything but discipline, Marine Corps discipline, was steadfastly mocked and ridiculed, be it holiness or high finance. These dril instructors were dedicated martinets. Like the sensualist who feels that if a thing cannot be eaten, drunk, or taken to bed, it does not exist, so were these martinets in their outlook. Al was discipline. It is not an attitude to be carried over into pursuits civilian; but it cannot be beaten for straightening civilian backs. Sergeant Bel ow was as strict as most. He would discipline us in the ordinary way: command a man to clean out the head with a toothbrush, or sleep with one’s rifle because it had been dropped, or worse, cal ed “a gun.” But above al he insisted on precision in marching. Once he grabbed me by the ear when I had fal en out of step. I am short, but no lightweight; yet he al but lifted me off my feet. “Lucky,” he said with a grim smile, seeming to delight in mispronouncing my name. “Lucky—if you don’t stay in step they’l be two of us in the hospital —so’s they can get mah foot out of youah ass!” Bel ow boasted that though he might dril his men into exhaustion beneath that semitropical South Carolina sun, he would never march them in the rain. Magnificent concession! Yet there were other instructors who not only dril ed their charges in the downpour, but seemed to delight in whatever discomfiture they could inflict upon them. One, especial y, would march his platoon toward the ocean. His chanted cadence never faltered. If they hesitated, breaking ranks at the water’s edge, he would fly into a rage. “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a bunch of damned boots! Who told you to halt? I give the orders here and nobody

halts until I tel them to.”
But if the platoon would march on resolutely into the water, he would permit his cadence to subside unnoticed until they had gone knee-deep, or at least to the point where the salt water could not reach their precious rifles. Then he would grin and simulate anger. “Come back here, you mothers’ mistakes! Get your stupid behinds out of that ocean!” Turning, fuming, he would address Parris Island in general: “Who’s got the most stupid platoon on this whole damned island? That’s right, me! I got it!” On the whole, the sergeants were not cruel. They were not sadists. They believed in making it tough on us, but they believed this for the purpose of making us turn out tough. Only once did I see something approaching cruelty. A certain recruit could not march without downcast eyes. Sergeant Bel ow roared and roared at him until even his iron voice seemed in danger of breaking. At last he hit upon a remedy. The hilt of a bayonet was tucked beneath the belt of the recruit, and the point beneath his throat. Before our round and fearful eyes, he was commanded to march. He did. But when his step faltered, when his eye became fixed and his breathing constricted, the sergeant put an end to it. Something like fear had communicated itself from recruit to sergeant, and Bel ow hastened to remove the bayonet. I am sure the sergeant has had more cause to remember this incident than has his victim.

2
It was difficult to form a lasting friendship then. Everyone realized that our unit would be broken up once the “boot” period ended. Some would go to sea, most would fil the ranks of the Fleet Marine force at New River, others would stay on at Parris Island. Nor was there much chance of camaraderie, confined as we were to those high-ceiled barracks. Warmth there was, yes, but no intimacy. Many friendships were mine in the Marine Corps, but of these I wil write in another place. Here the tale concerns a method, the making of marines. It is a process of surrender. At every turn, at every hour, it seemed, a habit or a preference had to be given up, an adjustment had to be made. Even in the mess hal we learned that nothing mattered so little as a man’s own likes or dislikes. I had always suspected I would not like hominy grits. I found that I did not; I stil do not. But on some mornings I ate hominy or went hungry. Often my bel y rumbled, ravenously empty, until the noon meal. Most of us had established ideas of what passes for good table manners. These did not include the thick sweating arm of a neighbor thrust suddenly across our lips, or the trickle-down-from-the-top method of feeding, whereby the men at the head of the table, receiving the metal serving dishes from the messmen, always dined to repletion, greedily impervious of the indignant shouts of the famished ones in the middle or at the end. Some of us might be disquieted at the sight of knives laden with peas or the wolfish eating noises that some of the men made, but we were becoming less and less sensitive in more and more places. Soon my taste buds served only as intestinal radar—to warn me that food was coming—and my sense of propriety deserted for the duration.
Worst in al this process of surrender was the ruthless refusal to permit a man the slightest privacy. Everything was done in the open. Rising, waking, writing letters, receiving mail, making beds, washing, shaving, combing one’s hair, emptying one’s bowels—al was done in public and shaped to the style and stricture of the sergeant.
Even food packages from home were seized by the dril instructor. We were informed of their arrival; that the dril instructor had sampled them; that he had found them tasty.
What! Now you are aroused! This is too much. This is tampering with the United States Mails! Ah, my friend, let me ask you this. Between the United States Mails and the United States Marines, who do you say would win? If you are undone in Parris Island, taken apart in those first few weeks, it is at the rifle range that they start to put you together again. Bel ow marched us most of the way to the rifle range—about five miles—in close order dril . (There is close order dril and there is route march, and the first is to the last as standing is to slouching.) We had our packs on our backs. Our sea bags would be at the tents when we arrived. We would complain of living out of packs and sea bags, blissful y unaware of the day when either would be a luxury. Then more than ever Bel ow seemed a thing of stone: stil lance-straight, iron voice tireless. Only at the end of the march did it sound a trifle cracked; a heartening sign, as though to assure us there was an impure al oy of us in him, too. We lived in tents at the rifle range, six men to a tent. Mine had wooden flooring, which most of the tents did not, and my tentmates and I counted this a great blessing. Nor did we fail to perceive the hand of Providence in keeping us six New Yorkers and Bostonians together; northern wheat separated from southern chaff. But the morning, the cold coastal morning, brought an end to that flattering notion. Yankee sangfroid was shattered by those rebel yel s of glee which greeted the sound of our chattering teeth and the sight of our blue and quivering lips. “Hey, Yank—Ah thought it was cold up Nawth. Thought you was used to it. Haw! Lookit them, lookit them big Yanks’ lips chatterin’.” Bel ow was so tickled he lost his customary reserve. “Ah guess youah right,” Bel ow said. “Ever time Ah come out heah Ah hear teeth chatterin’. And evra time it’s nawth’n teeth. Ah dunno.” He shook his head. “Ah dunno. Ah stil cain’t see how we lost.” In another half hour, the sun would be shining intensely, and we would learn what an alternating hel of hot and cold the rifle range could be. After washing, a surprise awaited us new arrivals in the head. Here was a sort of hurdle on which the men sat, with their rear ends poised above a stained metal trough inclined at an angle down which fresh water coursed. A group had gathered at the front of this trough, where the water was pumped in. Fortunately I was not among those engaged on the hurdle at the time. I could watch the surprise. One of the crowd had a handful of loosely bal ed newspapers. He placed them in the water. He lighted them. They caught the current and were off. Howls of bitter surprise and anguish greeted the passing of the fire ship beneath the serried white rears of my buddies. Many a behind was singed that morning, and not for as long as we were at the rifle range did any of us approach the trough without misgivings. Of course, we saw the foul trick perpetrated on other newcomers, which was hilarious. We got our inoculations at the rifle range. Sergeant Bel ow marched us up to the dispensary, in front of which a half dozen men from another platoon were strewn about in various stages of nausea, as though to warn us what to expect. Getting inoculated is inhuman. It is as though men were being fed into a machine. Two lines of Navy corpsmen stood opposite each other, but staggered so that no one man directly confronted another. We walked through this avenue. As we did, each corpsman would swab the bared arm of the marine in front of him, reach a hand behind him to take a loaded hypodermic needle from an assistant, then plunge the needle into the marine’s flesh. Thus was created a machine of turning bodies and proffering, plunging arms, punctuated by the wickedly glinting arc of the needle, through which we moved, halted, moved on again. It had the efficiency of the assembly line, and also something of the assembly line’s inability to cope with human nature. One of my tentmates, cal ed the Wrestler because of his huge strength and a brief career in the ring, had no idea of what was happening. He stood in front of me, in position to receive the needle; but he was so big he seemed to be in front of both corpsmen at the same time. While the corpsman on his right was swabbing, jabbing, so was the corpsman on his left. The Wrestler took both vol eys without a shiver. But then—before my horrified gaze, so quickly that I could not prevent it—the corpsmen went through their arm-waving, grasping motions again, and fired two more bursts into the Wrestler’s muscular arms. This was too much, even for the Wrestler. “Hey, how many of these do I get?”
“One, stupid. Move on.”
“One, hel ! I’ve had four already!”
“Yeah, I know. You’re the base commander, too. Get going, I told you—you’re holding up the line.” I broke in, “He isn’t kidding. He did get four. You both gave him two shots.” The corpsmen gaped in dismay. They saw unmistakable chagrin on the Wrestler’s blunt features and something like mirth on mine. They grabbed him and propel ed him to one of the dispensary doctors. But the doctor showed no alarm. He made his diagnosis in the context of the Wrestler’s muscles and iron nerve.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay. Just burned up.”
“Good. You’re probably al right. If you feel sick or nauseous, let me know.” It is the nature of anticlimax to report that the Wrestler did not feel sick. As for nausea, this engulfed the oversensitive among us who witnessed his

cavalry charge upon the meat loaf some fifteen minutes later.
The rifle range also gave me my first ful audition of the marine cursing facility. There had been slight samplings of it in the barracks, but never anything like the utter blasphemy and obscenity of the rifle range. There were noncommissioned officers there who could not put two sentences together without bridging them with a curse, an oath, an imprecation. To hear them made our flesh creep, made those with any depth of religious feeling flush with anger and wish to be at the weather-beaten throats of the blasphemers. We would become inured to it, in time, have it even on our own lips. We would come to recognize it as meaning no offense. But then it shocked us. How could they develop such facility with mere imprecation? This was no vituperation. It was only cursing, obscenity, blasphemy, profanity—none of which is ever profuse or original—yet it came spouting out in an amazing variety. Always there was the word. Always there was that four-letter ugly sound that men in uniform have expanded into the single substance of the linguistic world. It was a handle, a hyphen, a hyperbole; verb, noun, modifier; yes, even conjunction. It described food, fatigue, metaphysics. It stood for everything and meant nothing; an insulting word, it was never used to insult; crudely descriptive of the sexual act, it was never used to describe it; base, it meant the best; ugly, it modified beauty; it was the name and the nomenclature of the voice of emptiness, but one heard it from chaplains and captains, from Pfc.’s and Ph.D.’s—until, final y, one could only surmise that if a visitor unacquainted with English were to overhear our conversations he would, in the way of the Higher Criticism, demonstrate by measurement and numerical incidence that this little word must assuredly be the thing for which we were fighting. On the firing line, angry sergeants fil ed the air with their cursing, while striving to make riflemen of us in what had become an abbreviated training course. Marines must learn to fire standing, prone and sitting. Perhaps because the sitting position is the hardest to learn, that posture had some sort of vogue at the Parris Island rifle range.
They impressed the fashion upon us for two whole days on that miserable island’s blasted blistering sand dunes. We sat in the sun with sand in our hair, our ears, our eyes, our mouths. The sergeants didn’t care where the sand was, as long as it was not on the oiled metal parts of our precious rifles. There was no mercy for the unfortunate man who permitted this to happen. Punishment came swiftly: a hard kick and a horrible oath screamed directly into the miscreant’s ear.
To assume the sitting position, as the sergeant instructor would say, was to inflict upon yourself the stretching torture of the rack. The rifle was held in the left hand, at the center or “balance of the piece.” But the left arm had been inserted through a loop of the rifle sling, which was run up the arm to the bicep, where it was drawn unbelievably tight. Thus held, while sitting with the legs crossed, Buddha-style, the butt of the rifle was some few inches away from the right shoulder. The trick was to fit that butt snugly against the right shoulder, so that you could lay the cheek alongside the right hand, sight along the barrel, and fire. The first time I tried it I concluded it to be impossible, unless my back would part down the middle permitting each side of my torso to swing around and to the front as though hinged. Otherwise, no. Otherwise, the sling would cut my left arm in two, or my head would snap off from the strain of turning my neck, or I would have to risk it and aim the rifle single-handed, as a pistol. Fortunately, if I may use the word, the decision was not mine. Sergeant Bel ow came over.
“Trouble?” he inquired sweetly.
His manner should have warned me, but I mistook it for an unsuspected human streak. “Yes, sir.”
“My gracious.”
It was too late. I was caught. I looked up at him with dumb, pleading eyes. “Okay, lad, you jes get that rifle firmly in the left hand. Fine. Now the right. My, my. That is hard, ain’t it?” Whereupon Sergeant Bel ow sat on my right shoulder. I swear I heard it crack. I thought I was done. But I suppose it did nothing more than stretch a few ligaments. It worked. My right shoulder met the rifle butt and my left arm remained unsevered, and that was how I learned the unprofitable sitting position of shooting.
I saw but one Jap kil ed by a shot fired from the sitting position, and this only when no fire was coming from the enemy. Stil it was amazing how the marines could teach us to shoot within the few days they had us on the range; that is, teach the remarkable few among us who needed instruction. Most of us knew how to shoot; even, surprisingly, the big-city boys. I have no idea of how or where, in the steel-and-concrete wilderness of our modern cities, these boys had developed prowess in what seems a countrified pastime. But shoot they could, and wel . Al the southerners could shoot. Those from Georgia and the border state of Kentucky seemed the best. They suffered the indignity of the rifle sling while “snapping in” on the sand dunes. But when live ammunition was issued and the shooting butts were run up, they scorned such effete support, cuddled the rifle butts under their chins and blazed away. The dril instructors let them get away with it. After al , there is no arguing with a bul ’s-eye. I was one of those unacquainted with powder. I had never fired a rifle before, except an occasional twenty-two in a carnival shooting gal ery or the gaudy arcades of midtown New York. A thirty-caliber Springfield seemed to me a veritable cannon. The first time I sat on the firing line, with two five-round clips beside me, and the warning “Load and lock!” floating up from the gunnery sergeant, I felt as a smal animal must feel upon the approach of an automobile. Then came the feared commands. “Al ready on the firing line!”
“Fire!”
BA-ROOM!
It was the fel ow on my right. The sound seemed to split my eardrums. I jumped. Then the entire line became a splitting, roaring cauldron of sound; and I got my Springfield working with the rest of them, firing, ejecting, reloading. The ten rounds were gone in seconds. Silence came, and with it a ringing in my ears. They stil ring.
It was not long before I overcame my timidity and began to enjoy shooting. Of course, I made the mistakes al neophytes make—shooting at the wrong target, shooting under the bul ’s-eye, getting my windage wrong. But I progressed and when the day came to fire for record I had the monumental conceit to expect I would qualify as an expert. An Expert Rifleman’s badge is to shooting what the Medal of Honor is to bravery. It even brought five dol ars a month extra pay, a not inconsiderable sum to one earning twenty-one. The day when we shot for record—that is, when our scores would be official and determine whether we qualified or not—dawned windy and brutal y cold. I remember it as dismal, and that I longed to be near the fires around which the sergeants clustered, smoking cigarettes and forcing a gaiety I am sure no one could feel. My eyes ran water al day. When we fired from the six-hundred-yard range, I think I could just about make out the target. I failed miserably. I qualified for nothing. A handful qualified as marksmen, two or three as sharpshooters, none as experts. Once we had shot for “record” we were marines. There were a few other skil s to be learned—the block-parry-thrust of bayonet dril or pistol shooting—but these had no high place in the marine scale of values. The rifle is the marine’s weapon. So it was that we marched back to the barracks, with our chests swel ing with pride and our feet slapping the pavement, with the proud precision of men who had mastered the Springfield, or at least pretended that they had. We were veterans. When we arrived at the barracks, our path crossed that of a group of incoming recruits, stil in civilian clothes, seeming to us unkempt, bedraggled as birds caught in the rain. As though by instinct we shouted with one voice: “You’l be sorree!” Bel ow grinned with delight.

3
In five weeks they had made us over. Another week of training remained, but the desired change already had taken place. Most important in this transformation was not the hardening of my flesh or the sharpening of my eyes, but the new attitude of mind. I was a marine. Automatical y this seemed to raise me above the plodding herd of servicemen. I would speak disparagingly of soldiers as “dog-faces” and sailors as “swab-jockeys.” I would guffaw when the sergeant referred scathingly to West Point as “that boys’ school on the Hudson.” I would accept as gospel truth those unverifiable accounts of army or navy officers resigning their commissions to sign up as marine privates. I would acquire a store of knowledge covering the history of the Corps and would delight in relating anecdotes pointing up the invincibility of the embattled marine. To anyone but another marine, I would become insufferable. For the next week or so we merely went through the motions while awaiting assignment. We talked easily of “sea duty” or “guard duty.” In these waking dreams we al wore dress blue uniforms, drank copiously, danced, copulated, and general y played the gal ant. Occasional y, as the name of a family miscreant haunts the conversation of reunions, the name of “New River” popped up. This is the base where the First Marine Division was forming. At New River there were no dress blues, no girls, no dance bands; there was only beer and that marshland cal ed the boondocks. To mention New River was to produce painful pauses in the talk, until it would be forgotten in the next onrush of happy speculation. The day for departure came.
We swung our sea bags onto supply trucks. We donned our packs. We fel out gaily on the sidewalk before the barracks. We stood in the shadow of the balcony, a place made odious to us one day, when, to punish a butterfingers who had dropped his rifle, Bel ow had commanded him to stand there, erect, rifle at port arms, chanting from sunup to sundown: “I’m a bad boy, I dropped my rifle.” There we stood, awaiting orders. Bel ow fel us in. He ran us through the manual of arms. Our hands, slapping the rifle slings, made sure sounds. “At ease. Fal out. Get on those trucks.” We scrambled aboard. Someone at last mustered the courage to inquire: “Where we goin’, Sergeant?” “New River.”
The trucks drove off in silence. I remember Bel ow watching as we pul ed away, and how astonished I was to see the sadness in his eyes. We arrived at New River in darkest night. We had come from South Carolina by rail. There had been a good meal in the diner, as there always was in train travel. We had slept in our seats; packs on the racks above us, rifles by our sides. They fel us out of the train with much shouting and flashing of lights, and we formed ranks on the siding. Al was shadowy. None of these yel ing rushing figures—the N.C.O.’s and officers who received us—seemed related to reality, except in those moments when a flashlight might pin one of them against the darkness. Black as it was, I was stil able to gain the impression of vastness; the dome of heaven arching darkly overhead and stretching away from us—a limitless flatness broken only by silent huts. They marched us quickly to a lighted oblong hut, with a door at either end. We stood at one end, while an N.C.O. cal ed our names. “Leckie.”
I detached myself from my platoon, ending, in that motion, my association with the majority of the men who had been my comrades for six weeks. I walked quickly into the lighted hut. An enlisted man bade me sit down opposite his desk. There were three or four others like him in the hut, similarly “interviewing” new arrivals. He asked questions rapidly, interested only in my answers, ignoring me. Name, serial number, rifle number, etc.—al the dry detail that tel s nothing of a man.
“What’d you do in civilian life?”
“Newspaper, sports writer.”
“Okay, First Marines. Go out front and tel the sergeant.” That was how the Marines classified us. The questions were perfunctory. The answers were ignored. Schoolboy, farmer, scientist-of-the-future—al were grist to the reception mil and al came forth neatly labeled: First Marines. There were no “aptitude tests,” no “job analyses.” In the First Marine Division the presumption was that a man had enlisted to fight. No one troubled about civilian competence. It may have been an affront to those vestiges of civilian self-esteem which Parris Island had not had time to destroy, but New River soon would take care of that. Here, the only talent was that of the foot soldier, the only tool the hand gun; here the cultivated, the oblique, the delicate soon perished, like gardenias in the desert.
I felt the power of that attitude, and I felt, for the first time in my life, an utter submission to authority as I emerged from the lighted hut and mumbled “First Marines” to a cluster of sergeants standing there expectantly. One of them pointed with his flashlight to a group of men; I took my place among them. About a half dozen other groups were being formed in the same way. Then, at a command, I swung up on a truck with my new comrades. The driver started the motor and we rol ed off, bumping over pitted muddy roads, past row upon row of silent darkened huts, rol ing, ever rol ing, until suddenly we stopped with a lurch and were home. Home was H Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment. Home was a company of machine guns and heavy mortars. Someone in that cheerless hut had decided that I should be a machine gunner. The process of enrol ment in H Company hardly differed from the method of our “assignment” the night before, except that we were run through a hut occupied by Captain High-Hips. He fixed us with his gloriously militant glass eye, he fingered his military mustache, and he questioned us in his clipped British manner of speech. Then, with an air of skepticism, he assigned us to our squad huts and into the keeping of the N.C.O.’s now arriving from other regiments.
These men came from the Fifth and the Seventh, the veteran line units in whose ranks were almost al of the First Division’s trained troops. My regiment, the First, had been disbanded, but now, after Pearl Harbor it was being reactivated. The First needed N.C.O.’s, and many of those who came to us betrayed, by a certain nervousness of voice, a newness of rank. Their chevrons were shiny. A few had not found time to set them onto their sleeves; they were pinned on.
A few weeks before these corporals and Pfc.’s had been privates. Some predated us as marines by that margin only. But in such an urgent time, experience, however slight, is preferred to none at al . The table organization had to be fil ed. So up they went. But the First also received a vital leavening of veteran N.C.O.’s. They would teach us, they would train us, they would turn us into fighting troops. From them we would learn our weapons. From them we would take our character and temper. They were the Old Breed. And we were the new, the volunteer youths who had come from the comfort of home to the hardship of war. For the next three years, al of these would be my comrades—the men of the First Marine Division.

Robert Leckie, 1942

1
Huts, oil, beer.
Around these three, as around a sacramental triad, revolved our early life at New River. Huts to keep us dry; oil to keep us warm; beer to keep us happy. It is no unholy jest to cal them sacramental; they had about them the sanctity of earth. When I remember New River, I remember the oblong huts with the low roofs; I remember the oil stoves and how we slipped out at night, buckets in hand, to pilfer oil from the other companies’ drums, passing the men from the other companies, thieves in the night like ourselves; I remember the cases of canned beer in the middle of the hut and how we had pooled our every penny to go down to the slop chute to buy them, carrying them back boisterously on our shoulders, shouting and cheerful, because the warm dry huts awaited us, and soon the beer would be in our bel ies and the world would be ours. We were privates, and who is more carefree? Like the huts, oil and beer, I had a trinity of friends: Hoosier, the Chuckler and the Runner. I met Hoosier the second day at New River. He had arrived two days before us, and Captain High-Hips had made him his runner. In that first unorganized week, his clothes were always spattered with mud from his countless trips through the mire between the captain’s office and the other huts. I disliked him at first. He seemed inclined to look down on us from his high position in Captain High-Hips’ office. He seemed surly, too, with his square strong figure, tow hair and blue eyes—his curt intel igences from on high: “Cap’n wants two men bring in the lieutenant’s box.” But I was too inexperienced to see that the surliness was but a front for his being scared, like al of us. The immobile face was a façade; the forced downward curve of the mouth a hastily erected defense against the unknown. With time and friendship, that mouth would curve in a different direction, upward in a grin that was pure joy.
Chuckler was easier to know. We became friends the first day of gun dril , our introduction into the mysteries of the heavy, water-cooled, thirty-caliber machine gun. Corporal Smoothface, our instructor, a soft-voiced, sad-eyed youth from Georgia, made the dril a competition between squads to see which one could get its gun into action sooner. As gunner, Chuckler carried the tripod. As assistant gunner, I lugged the gun, a metal incubus of some twenty pounds. At a command, Chuckler raced off to a given point, spun the tripod over his head and set it up, while I panted off after him to slip the gun’s spindle into the tripod socket. We beat the other squad and the Chuckler growled with satisfaction. “Attaboy, Jersey,” he chuckled, as I slid alongside him and placed the machine gun box in feeding position. “Let’s show them bastards.” That was his way. He was fiercely competitive. He was profane. He had a way of chuckling, a sort of perpetual good humor, that stopped his aggressiveness short of push, and which softened the impact of his rough language. Like Hoosier and me, he was stocky, and like Hoosier, he was fair; but he had a rugged handsomeness that the Hoosier’s blunt features could not match. The three of us, and later, the Runner, who joined us on Onslow Beach, were al stocky and somewhere under five feet ten inches tal —a good build for carrying guns or tripods or the tubes and base plates which the men of our Mortar Section had to lug. And flinging these heavy pieces about seemed to constitute al of our training.
Gun dril and nomenclature. Know your weapon, know it intimately, know it with almost the insight of its inventor; be able to take it apart blindfolded or in the dark, to put it together; be able to recite mechanical y a detailed description of the gun’s operation; know the part played by every member of the squad, from gunner down to the unfortunates who carried the water can or the machine gun boxes, as wel as their own rifles. It was dul and it was depressing, and the war seemed very far away. It was always difficult to remain attentive, to keep from fal ing asleep under that warm Carolina sun, while the voice of the gunnery sergeant droned on—“Enemy approaching at six hundred yards … up two, right three … fire …” But for every hour there was a ten-minute break, in which we might talk and smoke and clown around. Hoosier and I were the clowns. He loved to mimic the Battalion Executive Officer, the Major, who had a mincing walk and a prim manner that was almost a caricature in itself. “Al right, men,” said the Hoosier, sashaying back and forth before us like the Major, “let’s get this straight. There’l be no thinking. No enlisted man is permitted to think. The moment you think, you weaken this outfit. Anyone caught thinking wil be subject to a general court-martial. Anyone in H Company having brains wil immediately return them to the Quartermaster. They’re running short of them up in Officer’s Country.” In these times also we would sing. Neither the Hoosier nor I could carry a tune, our idea of a scale being to raise or lower our voices. But we liked to bel ow out the words. Unfortunately for us—for al of us—we had no songs to sing except those tuneless pointless “war songs” then arriving in a sticky flood.
Refrains like “Just to show al those Japs, the Yanks are no saps” or “I threw a kiss in the ocean” hardly fil a man with an urge to kil or conquer. After a few days of singing these, we came to scorn them, and turned to singing the bawdies, which are at least rol icking. It is sad to have to go off to war without a song of your own to sing. Something like a rousing war song—something like the “Minstrel Boy” or something jol y and sardonic like the Englishman’s “Sixpence”—might have made the war a bit more worth fighting. But we got none. Ours was an Advanced Age, too sophisticated for such outdated frippery. War cries or war songs seemed rather naïve and embarrassing in our rational time. We were fed food for thought; abstractions like the Four Freedoms were given us. Sing a marching song about that, if you can. If a man must live in mud and go hungry and risk his flesh you must give him a reason for it, you must give him a cause. A conclusion is not a cause. Without a cause, we became sardonic. One need only examine the drawings of Bil Mauldin to see how sardonic the men of World War Two became. We had to laugh at ourselves; else, in the midst of al this mindless, mechanical slaughter, we would have gone mad. Perhaps we of the Marines were more fortunate than those of the other services, because in addition to our saving laughter we had the cult of the Marine.
No one could forget that he was a marine. It came out in the forest green of the uniform or the hour-long spit-polishing of the dark brown shoes. It was in the jaunty angle of the campaign hats worn by the gunnery sergeants. It was in the mark of the rifleman, the fingers of the gun hand longer than those of the other. It characterized every lecture, every dril or instruction circle. Sometimes a gunnery sergeant might interrupt rifle class to reminisce. “China, that’s the duty, lads. Give me ol’ Shanghai. Nothing like this hole. Barracks, good chow—we’d even eat off plates—plenty of liberty, dress blues. And did them Chinese gals love the marines! They liked Americans best, but you couldn’t get them out with a swabbie or a dog-face if they was a Gyrene around. That was the duty, lads.”
And because a marine is a volunteer there is always a limit to his griping. He can complain so far, until he draws down this rebuke: “You asked for it, didn’t you?”
Only once did I hear it possible that we might meet our match. At bayonet dril two lines of men faced each other. We held rifles to which were affixed bayonets sheathed in their scabbards. At a command the two lines met and clashed. But we did not suit the sergeant. Perhaps it was our disinclination to disembowel each other. He screamed for a halt and strode over to seize someone’s rifle.
“Thrust, parry, thrust!” he shouted, swinging the rifle through the exercise. “Thrust, parry, thrust! Then the rifle butt. Hit him in the bel y! Damn it, men, you’re going to face the most expert bayonet fighter in the world. You’re going to fight an enemy who loves cold steel! Look what they did in the Philippines! Look what they did in Hong Kong! I’m tel ing you, men, you’d better learn to use this thing if you don’t want some little yel ow Jap slashing your bel y wide open!”

It was embarrassing.
Even the other sergeants were a bit red-faced. I could not help comparing this sergeant and his simulated rage to the methods of those other sergeants in Parris Island, who used to taunt us to come at them with drawn bayonet, and laughingly disarm us. Poor fel ow; he thought to frighten was to instruct. I see him now as he was on Guadalcanal: eyes sunken in sockets round with fear, unfleshed face a thing of bone and sinew stretched over quivering nerve. Merciful y they evacuated him, and I never heard of him again. Nor did we ever have another unseemly suggestion of inferiority. When we were done dril ing we would form ranks and march home. Until a quarter mile from the huts, we walked in “route march.” Our rifles were slung; a man might slouch as he pleased. There was no step to be kept. Talking, joking, crying out to each other in the gathering dusk, it was a pleasant way to come home.
But at the quarter-mile point, the company commander’s voice roared out. “Commm-panee!” Our backs straightened. “Tennnshun!” The rifles snapped straight, spring came back to our step, the familiar cadence began. That was how we came home to the huts of H Company when the shadows were lengthening over the coastal marsh. Thirsty and dirty, we swung into the company street with the snap and precision of garrison troops on parade. Within another hour we would have revived with a wash and a hot meal. Someone would check the oil supply. “Hey, Lucky—we’re running low on oil.”
I would take the bucket and slip out into the night, bound for the oil dump. Chuckler and Hoosier would head for the slop chute. They would be back soon with the beer. The Gentleman, or someone, would sweep out the hut. Perhaps Oakstump would help—Oakstump, that short, bul -like farm lad from Pennsylvania, who didn’t drink or smoke (at least not then) but loved to squat on the floor, throwing his dice, shuffling his cards, plastering his hair with scented oil. To Oakstump, this was living: dice, cards, hair oil. Then, with the fire alight, the beer case set in the middle of the floor, we would lie back on our cots, heads propped against the wal , swil ing the beer and talking.
What did we talk about those nights?
There would have been much shop talk—gossip about our outfit and our destination, endless criticism of the food, the N.C.O.’s, the officers. There certainly would have been much talk of sex. Of course everyone would exaggerate his prowess with women, particularly the younger ones, as they would stretch the size of their income as civilians. I suppose much of our conversation was dul . It would seem so, now, I am sure. It was dul , but it was homey. We were becoming a family. H Company was like a clan, or a tribe of which the squad was the important unit, the family group. Like families, each squad differed from the other, because its members were different. They resembled in no way those “squads” peculiar to many war books—those beloved “cross sections” composed of Catholic, Protestant and Jew, rich boy, middle boy and poor boy, goof and genius—those impossible confections which are so pleasing to the national palate, like an Al -American footbal team. Nor was my squad troubled by racial or religious bigotry. We had no “inner conflict,” as the phrase goes. These things happen most often in the imagination of men who never fought. Only rear echelons with plenty of fat on them can afford such rich diseases, like an epicure with his gout. We could not stand dissension, and we sank al differences in a common dislike for officers and for discipline; and later on, for the twin enemies of the Pacific, the jungle and the Jap.
The squad, as the sociological sample, squirming under the modern novelist’s microscope or pinioned on his pencil, is unreal. It is cold. It is without spirit. It has no relation to the squads I knew, each as gloriously different from the other as the men themselves were separate and alone. Lew Juergens (“Chuckler”)

2
Sergeant Thinface took over our platoon. Lieutenant Ivy-League, our platoon leader, would join us a few days later. But, for the present, Thinface was in charge. He could not have been much older than I—perhaps a few months—but he had been in the Marines for three years. That made him ages my senior.
“Al right, here it is,” he told us. He brushed back his lank blond hair quickly. His thin boy’s face was screwed up earnestly, as it always was when he was giving the troops the straight. “Here it is. We’re moving out to the boondocks. Enlisted men”—how N.C.O.’s love that phrase—“enlisted men wil fal out tomorrow morning in ful marching gear. Sea bags wil be locked and left in the huts. Check your mess gear. Be sure your shelter half is okay. You better have the right amount of tent pegs or it’l be your ass. “Al liberty is canceled.”
We grumbled and returned to our huts. We fel to assembling our packs. And then, for the first time, the officers began to amuse themselves at playing- with-soldiers. Every hour, it seemed, Sergeant Thinface burst in on us with a new order, now confirming, now contradicting his earlier marching instructions.
“C.O. says no tent pegs.”
“Battalion says to take your sea bags.”
“Belay that—get those tent pegs in your shelter halves.” Only the Hoosier, who had the born private’s calm contempt for officers, refused to join the general confusion. Each time the harried Thinface came panting in with a fresh order, Hoosier arose from his cot and listened to him with grave concern. But when Thinface disappeared, he shrugged and returned to his cot to sit there, smoking, surveying us with a superior look. “Hoosier,” I said. “Aren’t you going to pack?” “I got my stuff out,” he said, pointing to an array of socks, shorts, shaving cream and other impedimenta. “Aren’t you going to pack it?” “Hel , no, Lucky! I’l pack it in the morning—soon’s they make their sil y minds up.” Chuckler’s husky voice cut it, that quality of mirth softening the rebuke. “You’d better. They’l have an inspection and it’l be your ass. They’l throw you so far back in the brig, they’l have to feed you with a slingshot.” Hoosier snorted derisively, lapsing into a wide-mouthed grin. Al afternoon he watched us, smoking, pul ing away at two cans of warm beer he had secreted the night before, certain al the while he would be proven right. He was. We put and took incessantly, veering like weather vanes in the shifting wind of orders blowing down from officer’s country. But Hoosier was right. In the morning the final order came from the battalion commander. He had abstained from playing soldier. But when his order came through it was like none of the others, because it was official. We tore our packs down, reassembled them, and then swung the whole bulky business onto our backs. I do not recal how much the marching order weighed. Maybe twenty pounds. Even in this, men are so different. I carried the barest minimum, exactly what the colonel prescribed. But a man concerned for cleanliness might slip in a few extra bars of soap or carry a bottle of hair oil; another might cache two cans of beans in the bottom of his pack; a third could not bear to come away without a bundle of letters from home. A soldier’s pack is like a woman’s purse: it is fil ed with his personality. I have saddened to see the mementos in the packs of dead Japanese. They had strong family ties, these smooth-faced men, and their packs were ful of their families. We fel in in front of the huts. The packs had a warm comfortable heavy feeling. “Forrr-ward—harch! Route step—harch!” Off we went to the boondocks. Perhaps we walked ten miles; not much by the standards of veterans, but it was a great distance then. The route was through the pine woods, over a dirt road barely wide enough to admit a jeep. A whole battalion was on the march, and my poor squad was tucked away somewhere at center or center rear. Clouds of red dust settled upon us. My helmet banged irritably against the machine gun that was boring into my shoulder, or else it was bumped forward maddeningly over my eyes by the movement of my pack. A mile or so out, I dared not drink any more from my canteen. I had no idea how far we had to go. My dungarees were saturated with sweat, their light green darkened by perspiration. There had been joking and even some singing the first mile out. Now, only the birds sang; but from us there was just the thud of feet, the clank of canteens, the creak of leather rifle slings, the occasional hoarse cracking of a voice raised and breath wasted in a curse. Every hour we got a ten-minute break. We lay propped against the road bank, resting against our packs. Each time, I reached under my pack straps to massage the soreness of my shoulders where the straps had cut. We would smoke. My mouth was dusty dry, my tongue swol en. I would moisten them with a swig of precious water, and then, stupidly, dry the whole thing out again, instantly, with a mouthful of smoke. But it was blissful lying there against the road bank, with al the pain and strain and soreness gone—or at least suspended—and our nostrils fil ed with the mistaken pleasures of tobacco. Then came the command: “Off and on!”
It means off your behind and on your feet. Cursing, hating both command and commandant, straining, we rose to our feet and began again the dul plodding rhythm of the march.
This was how we came to where the Higgins Boats were waiting for us. It was where the road arrived at one of those canals which interlace this part of North Carolina and are part of the Inland Waterway System. It was like a live thing, this watery labyrinth, curving and darting through the pine wood, seeming to cavort on its way to the sea. We climbed stiffly into the boats, sitting with our heads just above the gunwales, our helmets between our knees. Hardly had our boat begun to move than the man on my left threw up. He was Junior, a slender, timid kid, much too shy for the Marines. Junior was from Upstate New York and was no sailor: leeward or windward were al one to him. He vomited to windward. It came back upon us in a stringy spray, unclean, stinking. Curses beat upon Junior’s head unmatched in volume even by the thin cry of the gul s wheeling overhead. “Cain’t you use your helmet,” Hoosier growled. “Cripes, Junior. What do you think it’s fer?” By this time others were sick and were making ful use of their helmets. Poor Junior smiled his timid smile of appeal, obviously glad that he was not the only culprit. By the time we had reached the sea and were wal owing offshore in the deep troughs of the surf, half of the boat had become sick, to the immense glee of the boatswain.
Endlessly, with the finality of judgment, the boat lifted and dropped; the desolate ocean swel ed and subsided; and above it al stood the boatswain behind his wheel, compassionate as a snake, obviously rehearsing the gleeful tale with which he would regale his swab-jockey buddies—of how the stuck-up marines survived their first ordeal with the great salt sea. We were circling, I know now, while awaiting word to head shoreward in what was to be our first amphibious maneuver. When it came, our boat’s motor roared into ful voice. The prow seemed to dig into the water and the boat to flatten out. Merciful y, the rocking motion was abated. “Down!”
The boats fanned out into assault line. We roared shoreward. The spray settled cool y on my face. There was nothing but the sound of the motors. There came a rough jolt, fol owed by the crunching sound of the keel beneath us plowing into the sand. We had landed.

“Up and over!”
I held my rifle high, grasped the gunwale with the other hand, and vaulted into the surf. I landed in cold water just above my calves. But the weight of my pack and weapons brought me almost to my knees. I was soaked. Weighted now by water as wel as gear, we pelted up the beach. “Hit the deck!”
We did. When we arose, after working our weapons against an imaginary defender, the sand clung to us like flour to a fil et. The sweat of the march already had enflamed the moving parts of the flesh; the salt of the sea was into it, burning, boring; now to this was added the ubiquitous sand. The order came to fal in and to march off to our new camp, about a mile farther on, and as we did, the pain was excruciating. Each step, each thoughtless swing of the arm, seemed to draw a ragged blade across crotch and armpits. When we had hobbled the distance, we came to a thick pine wood. On one side of the road the secondary growth had been cleaned out, and there the wood was more of a glade. In it were erected three pyramidal tents—one for the gal ey, another for sick bay, a third for the company commander. They fel us out here and told us this was our camp. A cold rain had begun to fal as the compound began to be divided and subdivided into platoon and squad areas. Pup tents began to appear—not in careful, precise rows as in the old days, but careful y staggered à la the new passion for camouflage. Exhausted as we might have been, suffering from the irritations of the march and the sea, hungry, shivering now in this cold rain—the business of setting up camp should have been a grim and cheerless affair. But it was not. We did not even curse the officers. Suddenly the thing became exciting, and the heat of the excitement was far too much for cold rain or empty stomachs or aching bones. Soon we were limping about in search of pine needles to place beneath our blankets. What a bed! Dark green blanket above, another below, and beneath it al the pliant pungent earth and fragrant pine needles. As I say, we hurried about, and soon the glade resounded to our cal s, the shouting back and forth and the good-natured swearing at the clumsy ones who could not then, or ever, erect a pup tent. And the rain—that baleful, wet intruder—perhaps confused at being the only mournful one among our carefree company, alternated between a drizzle, a drip and a downpour. When we had ditched our tents—that is, dug a trough around them so that the ground within the tent would remain dry—we heard the cal for chow. The food was hot, as was the coffee, and men living in the open demand no more. It had grown late, and it was in darkness that we finished our meal and washed our metal mess gear.
Returning to our company, we came through F Company’s area, tripping over pegs, lurching against tents and provoking howls of wrath from the riflemen within.
Penetrating references were made to machine gunners, and there were lucid descriptions of the lineage from which al gunners sprang. But such maledictions, though there is about them a certain grand vulgarity, are unprintable. So ended—in rain, in darkness, in a vol ey of oaths—our first day in the field. We had qualified for the ranks of the gloriously raggedy-assed. Next day I met Runner. He had been in Hoosier’s squad for the past few days, a late arrival, but I had not encountered him. He was coming away from Chuckler’s tent, laughing, tossing a wisecrack over his shoulder, and we bumped into each other. He almost knocked me over, moving with that brisk powerful walk. That was the thing about Runner: those strong, phenomenal y developed legs. He had been a sprint man in prep school—a good one, as I learned later—and the practice had left its mark in those bulging calves. Runner fitted us like a glove. His admiration for Chuckler was akin to hero worship. But Chuckler had the strength to prevent that without offending the Runner, and I suspect that he took a human delight in the adulation of the dark-haired boy from Buffalo, who spoke so knowingly of formal dances and automobiles, a world quite apart from Chuckler’s Louisvil e rough-and-tumble. As friendship became firmer among us four, it became clear that Chuckler’s word was going to carry the most weight, simply because he could rely on Runner’s support.
So Chuckler became the leader, a fact which neither Hoosier nor I ever admitted and which Runner indicated only by his deference to him. It is odd, is it not, that there should have been need of a leader? But there was. Two men do not need a leader, I suppose; but three do, and four most certainly, else who wil settle arguments, plan forays, suggest the place or form of amusement, and general y keep the peace? This was the beginning of our good times here in the boondocks. We slept on the ground and had but a length of canvas for a home, but we had begun to pride ourselves on being able to take it. Under such conditions, it was natural that the good times should be uproarious and, often, violent. A day’s training could not tire such young spirits or bodies. If there were no night exercises, or company guard, we were free from after chow until reveil e. Sometimes we would gather around a fire, burning pine knots and drinking from a bottle of corn liquor bought from local moonshiners. The pine knots burned with a fragrant bril iance, as did the white lightning in our bel ies.

Wilber “Bud” Conley (“Runner”)
We would sing or wrestle around the fire. There would be other fires; and sometimes rival singing contests, which soon degenerated into shouting matches, developed. Occasional y a luckless possum would blunder into the circle, and there would arise a floundering and a yel ing fol owed by a frantic shucking of shoes, with which life was pounded out of the poor little animal. Then the men who loved to sharpen their blades would whip out these razor bayonets and skin the beast. Its tiny, greasy carcass would be consigned to the flames, and a pitiful few mouths it was that ever got to taste of the poor thing.
At other times, Hoosier and Chuckler and Runner and I would gather after chow and walk the two miles from camp to the highway, the sound of our going muffled by the thick dust underfoot; sometimes silent in that violet night with the soft pine wood at either side; sometimes boisterous, dancing in the dust, leaping upon one another, shouting for the sake of hearing our voices flung back by the hol ow darkness; sometimes sober, smoking, talking in low voices of things at home and of when or where we would ever get into action. The highway was a midway. It was lined with honky-tonks. To reach it was to sight a new world: one moment the soft dark and the smel of the wood, our shoes padding in the dust; in the next, cars and military vehicles hurtling down the cement strip, the crude shacks with their bare electric bulbs shining unashamed, their rough joints plastered with Coca-Cola and cigarette ads. There were no girls, though. Sex was farther up the road, in Morehead City and New Bern. Here it was drinking and fighting. There was a U.S.O. at Greenvil e, but marines from the boondocks, clad in their dungarees, rarely went there except at the risk of being picked up by the M.P.’s for being out of uniform. Chuckler and I chanced it, once, and were rewarded with delicious hamburgers. The Green Lantern became my battalion’s hangout, probably because it stood closest to us on that garish highway, on the corner where the dirt road met the concrete and seemed to slip beneath it. It had the attraction that banks advertise, conveniently located. Fights were common in The Green Lantern. They were always just ending or just beginning or just brewing no matter when you arrived. Every morning at sick cal the evidence was plain: gentian violet daubed with a sort of admiring liberality over bruised cheekbones and torn knuckles. We had our first adventure in another of the shacks. It was on a weekend and we were in ful uniform, having come back to the huts and been given a rare liberty. The four of us were en route to Morehead City at night and drinking along the way. We hitchhiked because we could not afford the exorbitant taxi fares. But we tired of fruitlessly thumbing for rides and frequently crossed the road into the shacks. In one, when we had discovered our money was getting low, I proposed stealing a case of beer. The cases were stacked up at the back of the room in ful view. “You’re nuts,” Chuckler growled in a low voice. “You’l never make it. He can see every move you make.” I persisted. “No. We’l go to the head—it’s right near the beer. The door opens inward. We’l crawl out and work one of the cases loose. He can’t see over the counter. We’l push it right under his nose, and when we get near the door—we’l just jump up and run for it.” Chuckler grinned. “Okay.”
It was smooth. We worked a case free, and, worming on our bel ies, silently conveyed it to the door beneath the very nose of the proprietor. We were as two caterpil ars connected by the case of beer, a sort of copula. Only the endurance of the boondocks enabled us to hold that bulky, heavy case a few inches from the floor, so that it would emit no tel tale scraping while we squirmed doorward. When we had arrived there, we got our knees under us, secured the case between us, came halfway erect and shot through the open door like Siamese twins.
It was exhilarating. The night air was like a buoyant tonic as we streaked for the highway, then across it impervious to the breakneck traffic streaming up and down. On the other side, we dropped the case on the shoulder of the road and rol ed down the bank, laughing, whooping gleeful y, half hysterical. We would al be six bottles of beer richer, and the night seemed to stretch out in time. Chuckler crawled back up to the road, while I remained to relieve myself. When I returned I saw he was not alone. A man was with him, and he spoke to me as I approached.
“Take that damn case back,” he said. It was the proprietor. I pretended a jol y laugh. “Take it back yourself,” I said. Then I saw he had a gun. He waved it at me. I could see he was angry. But I was stupid, and when he repeated: “Take it back,” I thought he was going to shoot me. But he merely was tightening his grip on the pistol. My bravado departed. With Chuckler, I took hold of the case and carried it back across the road, the proprietor covering us from behind with his pistol. Shame burned my cheeks upon our re-entry. Runner hid a grin behind his hand. We marched to the back of the shack, like men walking the plank, and restored the case to its place.
Compassion is a specialty; it is a hidden talent. The proprietor had compassion. When we turned, he was walking behind the bar toward Runner and Hoosier. His pistol must have been pocketed at the door. He had conveyed to everyone in the shack the notion that our unsuccessful robbery was a great joke. He had four bottles of beer opened when we rejoined Runner and Hoosier. “Here, boys,” he said, “have one on me.”

We told him we were sorry. He grinned.
“Lucky for you Ah’m soft-hearted. When Ah saw yawl run out of heah with that case, Ah was so damn mad Ah felt like shooting yuh right in the ass. Reckon you lucky Ah changed mah mind.”
We laughed and drank up. He grinned again, pleased that he had mastered us and could dispense with punishment like the gracious conqueror he was.
One could always bargain for trouble in those shacks. And one could always bargain for trouble of a different sort in the cafés of the camp towns—New Bern, Morehead City, Wilmington. I cal them cafés, because that was how their proprietors styled them. They were hardly better than the shacks, except that they were on the streets of the towns rather than the highway and they had paint on the wal s. But there was also this great difference: there were girls. They came from the town and had no connection with the cafés. Probably the proprietors encouraged their presence, perhaps presented them with favors, but they did not have the official standing, to use a euphemism, as do dime-a-dance girls or the professional teasers of the big-city clip joints. In the marine towns of New Bern and Morehead City—where the streets were thronged with green on Saturdays—there were cafés at every turn: cheap, dingy, the air banked with clouds of cigarette smoke, and the juke-box wail so piercing that one half expected to see it stir up eddies in the lazy smoke.
Always the girls.
They sat at marble-topped tables where the faded wide-ringed imprints of soda glasses were linked to one another by the newer, narrower marks of the beer bottles. This was the beer hal , superimposed on the soda parlor. They sat at the tables, drinking slowly, smoking, giggling, their bodies seeming to strain to be free of their tight clothing—mouths working, sometimes with gum, sometimes with words, but no matter, for it was the eyes that counted, the eyes roving, raking the tables, parading the aisles, searching … hunting … hungering for the bold, answering look … and when it came, the deliberate crushing of the cigarette, the languid getting to the feet and straightening of the skirt, the sauntering, thin-hipped progress to the table, as though they had sat through endless showings of “Hel ’s Angels” and had sex down stride perfect.
When I went to New Bern and the cafés, it was usual y with Corporal Smoothface. He cal ed me “Licky.” “C’mon, Licky,” he’d say, “let’s go to New Bern,” running the syl ables of the town’s name together so that they sounded as one. Corporal Smoothface married a girl he met in a café. An hour after he met her, he took off for South Carolina in a car hired with money I got from pawning my watch. He couldn’t get married in New Bern on a Saturday afternoon, but he knew of a South Carolina justice of the peace who would perform the ceremony. After the wedding, he turned around and drove back, spending a one-day honeymoon in New Bern and appearing at Monday morning reveil e in New River.
Smoothface never paid me back for the watch. I am sure he considered it a wedding present. So be it.

3
Liberty became less frequent as training grew more intense. Soon we were not going back to the base at al . The days clicked off dul y, al the same. Saturdays and Sundays were no different from the rest, except that we could be sure to be routed out of bed every Sunday morning by a forest fire. No one was ever positive that the Major set them, neither did anyone doubt that he did. There was no arson in his heart, we reasoned, merely an unwil ingness to contemplate the troops’ resting easy in their sacks. But, as I say, there was no proof—who wants proof of fact?—except that the fires always seemed to occur Sunday morning in the same general area, and in parts of the wood where there was little danger of their spreading. So we would be piled into trucks, heaping imprecation on the Major, beseeching heaven to fry him to a cinder in his own holocaust, and be bundled off to the burning.
We put out the fires by building backfires, digging trenches, or sometimes, merely squelching the upstarts among this red breed by flailing away at them with branches before they could blossom into flaming maturity. It was in one of these that my clothes caught fire. I was standing in the middle of a scorched and smoking meadow, so hot that my feet felt on fire, even through the thick crepe soles of my shoes, through my heavy socks and formidable cal uses. I looked down and saw with quick horror that at the inner ankle of my left leg my rol ed pants cuffs were smoldering, now puffing into flame.
I ran like the wind, not in fright but in a deliberate sprint for a log fence on the other side of which lay high grass and cool earth. I knew that I could not extinguish the myriad smoldering places in my pants by slapping them; I had to rol on the ground, heap dirt on myself. This I could not do where I stood. I ran. I raced for the fence; and my buddies, thinking me daft with fear, gave pursuit—bel owing entreaties for me to halt. I beat them to the fence and dived over it, landing on my shoulder, rol ing over and over, over and over, scooping up handfuls of dirt and rubbing them on my burning pants and socks. When they dived on top of me, as though I were liable to be up and off again, I had the fire out. It was Runner who landed on me first. Thank God I had had a head start on him, else I would never had made the fence; and I am no longer curious to know what my friends would have done, had they overtaken me in the middle of that hot and sparking meadow. I got a nasty burn on my inner ankle where the sock had been alight. It crippled me for a few days and I stil carry a faint scar. Now the training was ending. Days, days, endless grinding days, aimless sweating complaining days, running into each other without point like the mindless tens of days of the French Revolution … days on the mock-up, clambering up and down the rough, evil-smel ing cargo nets draped over the gaunt wooden structure, like the Trojan Horse, built to resemble the side of a ship … digging days, out in the field scooping out shal ow holes, the depressions for which the men in the Philippines had given the name foxholes—digging, scooping, scraping; got to get below the contour of the earth, got to dig, got to flop into the earth’s fresh wound, the face pressed deep into the fragrant soil while the worms squirm round in consternation as though dismayed by the hastiness of the graves and the heartiness of the bodies that fil ed them. … days on the march, the sun on the helmet and the sweat gathering in the eyebrows like the sea in a marsh, powdering the upper lip with water, dropping off the point of the chin, while the whole body, soft no longer, rejoices in its movement, the fluid, sweat-oiled movement—the teasing trickle down the groove of the back, and the salt savor of it when the sensuous tongue curls out to kiss the upper lip … days of al kinds, boring and brutalizing, tedious hours wal owing in the gray sea troughs … days of lectures, of shooting, of inspections, of cleaning tents and weapons, of military courtesy, of ennui in the midst of birds singing and officers wrangling over maps … of tedium … of indifference to pain … of rain dripping in forests and wet blankets … of no God but the direct assault … of eyes brightening and bones hardening … and now the last day, like the stooks rising “barbarous in beauty,” we are finished. On the last day Secretary of the Navy Knox came down from Washington to look at us. They drew us up in serried, toy-soldier ranks beside the Inland Waterway, in the shadow of our mock-up.
I do not recal how long we waited for Knox. It may have been an hour, or it may have been two. But it was not too uncomfortable, standing there in the sun, once they had given us a “parade rest.” Suddenly a bugle cal pealed from the Waterway. They snapped us to attention. A gleaming launch swept up the canal, banners streaming, prow high and haughty, stern down and driving—like a spirited horse. It was the Secretary. The company commander joined the ranks of the official party as it reached our ranks, leaving Old Gunny behind to give the salute. He stood there, square and ancient, a mandarin of marines, hash-marked and privileged—an awesome figure to any officer below the rank of colonel. The Secretary and the others passed. The unpopular Major brought up the rear. Just as he came by, Old Gunny’s voice broke into a clear precise growl that could be heard by the battalion: “At ease!”
We slumped over our rifles. The Major’s face colored like sunrise at sea. A silent spasm of mirth ran through the company. You could not hear it; but it could be felt. The Major hastened on, as though departing a place accursed. When Old Gunny swung round in that deliberate about-face of his, his wrinkled visage was creased in a curve of satisfaction; like the Cheshire Cat, he was al grin.
The Secretary did not inspect us—not my company, anyway. I have always felt that he came down to New River in those despairing days only to be sure that there were actual y men there, as though he might have suspected that the First Marine Division, like so many of our military then, might be composed only of paper.
The period at the boondocks ended that day. No sooner had the Secretary regained his launch than we were breaking camp. We were going back to the comparative luxury of the huts, the mess hal s, the slop chutes. We were glad of it. The war was stil far away from us. Even then, no one grasped the import of the Secretary’s visit.
Life was easier on the base. Our officers became kinder. The sixty-two-hour liberty, from four o’clock Friday afternoon until reveil e Monday, made its appearance. Immediately the surrounding towns lost their attraction and we began going home. The highway outside the compound was thronged with taxicabs. On Friday afternoons it was a sight to see them load up with marines and roar off, one after another, like big race cars rol ing out of the pits. Usual y five of us would charter a taxicab for Washington, approximately three hundred miles distant. From there we caught the regular trains to New York. It was expensive—something like twenty dol ars apiece for the driver to take us up and to wait to take us back Sunday night. Natural y, the money had to come from our parents. Twenty-one-dol ar-a-month privates could not afford it, nor could twenty-six-dol ar privates first class, a rank I had recently attained. Though costly, the taxicab was the fastest and surest way to travel. Train service was slow and spotty. If a man missed connections, he was sure to be A.W.O.L. at Monday morning reveil e. At times the taxicab would sway with the speed of our homeward dash up the coast, especial y if one of us would take the wheel from a driver reluctant to obey our commands to “step on it.” Then we would fairly fly—ninety, ninety-five, whatever speed we could reach by stamping the gas pedal down to the floor.
We usual y arrived at Union Station in Washington at about midnight, never having left New River much before six o’clock. The trains to New York always were crowded. Every car seemed equipped with a Texan or a hil bil y, replete with banjo and nasal voice, or had its quota of drunks draped over

the arms of the seats or stretched out on the floor like rugs. We stepped over them on our way to the parlor car, where we would drink away the night and
the miles, until dawn crept dirtily, mosquito-in-the-morning-like, over the Jersey meadows. That was the way of it: impatience burning in our bel ies and only the whiskey to wet it down. Who could eat? My father took me, on one of those flying visits, to a famous English fish and fowl house in downtown New York. I toyed with my half of a roast pheasant, able to swal ow only a mouthful, impervious to savor, while eagerly gulping beer after beer. How that unfinished pheasant haunted me two months later on Guadalcanal, when hunger rumbled in my bel y like the sound of cannonading over water. We were impatient. We were wound up. We could no more relax than we could think. In those days there was not an introspective person among us. We seldom spoke of the war, except as it might relate to ourselves, and never in an abstract way. The ethics of Hitler, the extermination of the Jews, the Yel ow Peril—these were matters for the gentlemen of the editorial pages to discuss. We lived for thril s—not the thril s of the battlefield, but of the speeding auto, the dimly lighted café, the drink racing the blood, the texture of a cheek, the sheen of a silken calf.
Nothing was permitted to last. Al had to be fluid; we wanted not actuality, but possibility. We could not be stil ; always movement, everything changing. We were like shadows fleeing, ever fleeing; the disembodied phantoms of the motion picture screen; condemned men; souls in hel . Soon the spate of sixty-two-hour liberties was ended. Mid-May of 1942 saw me home for the last time. My family would not set eyes on me again for nearly three years.
The Fifth Marine Regiment left before we did. It departed during the night. When we awoke, their regimental area was deserted, picked clean, as though not even a shade had dwelt there, let alone thirty-five hundred exuberant young men. Not so much as a shredded cigarette butt or an empty beer can remained.
Clean.
My own First Regiment fol owed the Fifth within weeks. We packed our sea bags with al our excess clothing and personal gear. Each bag was careful y stenciled with our company markings. Then al were carried off on trucks. I never saw mine again until I returned to the States. From that day forward —save for brief intervals in Australia—we lived out of our packs, the single combat pack about the size of a portable typewriter case. We were under orders to carry only our weapons and a prescribed amount of clothing; specifical y, no liquor. A day before we left I managed to get into Jacksonvil e, where I pawned my suitcase for enough money to buy two pints of whiskey. The two flat bottles were in my pack, hard and warm against my back, when we clambered aboard the train. We finished them that night, when the porter had made our beds and al was dark in our Pul man car. Yes, we traveled by Pul man and we had a porter. We ate in a dining car, too, and the porter could be bribed to fetch us a turkey sandwich at night. It was a wonderful way to ride off to war, like the Russian nobleman in War and Peace who dashed off to the fray in a handsome carriage, watching Borodino from a hil ock while his manservant brewed tea in a silver samovar. We had a jovial porter. He loved to josh the Texan, newly arrived in our platoon. Once, he overheard the Texan making one of his tal Texas boasts. “Hel ,” the porter laughed, “dat Texas so dried up a rabbit doan dare cross without he carry a box lunch and canteen.” A roar of laughter rose around the blushing Texan, and the porter retired grinning happily. Our spirits were high and our hearts light as we rode across America. Our talk was ful of the air-sea Battle of Midway, which had just been fought, and we were ful of admiration for the marine and navy pilots who had stopped the Japanese. Mostly we played poker or watched the countryside flowing past. To me, who had never been west of Pittsburgh, almost every waking moment was one of intense excitement. This was my country. I was seeing it for the first time and I drew it into me, here in its grandeur, again in the soft beauty of a mountain like the curve of a cheek, in the vastness of its plains or the bounty of the fields. I cannot recal it al and, now, I regret that I took no notes. There are only blurs and snatches … disappointment at crossing the Mississippi at night, only the impression of a great wetness and the gentle sway of the railroad barge beneath us … the beauty of the Ozarks, green woods swel ing to a fragile blue sky, with the White River leaping straight and clean like a lance beneath them, and the one hil with the cross at the crest, stretching its gaunt arms like an entreaty … the Rockies (Where was the grandeur? Were we too close?) seeming like peaks of vanil a ice cream down which coursed great runnels of chocolate sauce, but no grandeur, only when we had reached the heights and could look back, gasping … ah, but here it is, now, here is the splendid West, here is the Colorado River thrusting through the Royal Gorge in one white, frothing instant … up, up, up in Nevada, the train climbing like a great dignified rol er coaster, and then the sweeping ascent into California and the sun.
But we lost the sun in the San Francisco mists. We were at the waterfront and surrounded by the brown hil s of Berkeley. The great curving bay, like a watery amphitheater, was before us. There were seals playing in the bay. I was only twenty-one. I could see the Golden Gate, and out beyond lay the Thing that I would see. Not yet, though. Not for ten days would we go out the Golden Gate. They marched us aboard the George F. Elliott. She became our ship. She was an African slaver. We hated her.
They let us go ashore every day.
These days were the final and the frantic hours of our flight. Except for Chinatown, I saw nothing but bars and cafés in San Francisco. My father had sent me a hundred dol ars in response to my last plea for money. Because of this, I could see the best cafés as wel as the lowest bars. They are al one. I can remember nothing of them, save for a juke box playing “One Dozen Roses” over and over again, and once, in a Chinatown walk-up being thrown out bodily because I had leapt in among the wearily gesturing chorus girls and shouted “Boo!”

The same night I chased two Chinamen away from a marine. I never saw the knives, but they must have had them, for the marine’s tan shirt was bright with blood. He lay slumped in a doorway—a lunch counter, I think. I shouted in fury at the proprietor. He had watched the assault stonily, but now, as I shouted, he moved to his telephone and cal ed the police. I left, fearing the M.P.’s. There were many episodes in those ten days. But they were al the same—smeared with lust or bleared by appetite. Final y I was sated. I was jaded. San Francisco ended for me one night as I rode in a taxicab with Jawgia, the freckled, sharp-featured cracker from the Okefenokee Swamp of Georgia, whose name suggested both his home state and his habit of jawing about the Civil War. Jawgia clambered out and the guard swung the gate open. I peered into the driver’s face, dropped three pennies—the only money we had left—into his outstretched hand, and said, “Buy yourself the best damn newspaper in town!” I slipped through the gate, and with a wild yel ran for my ship. One of the coins the driver threw hit me as I ran.
Our ship left in the morning, in a drizzle, on June the twenty-second, 1942. It moved, unlovely gray hulk, under the Golden Gate Bridge. I sat on the stern and looked back, searching. In the manner of the immigrant who takes a clod of his country’s soil on his voyage with him, I sought a memory to take with me.
High above, in the middle of the wetly gleaming bridge, stood a sentry in poncho and kel y helmet, his rifle a hump on his back. He waved. He waved steadily, for minutes, while al around me the snickers and the catcal s mounted. I loved him for it. He waved to me.

1
Fires flickered on the shores of Guadalcanal Island when we came on deck. They were not great flaming, leaping fires, and we were disappointed. We had expected to see the world alight when we emerged from the hatches. The bombardment had seemed fierce. Our armada, for such we judged it to be, seemed capable of blasting Guadalcanal into perdition. But in the dirty dawn of August 7, 1942, there were only a few fires flickering, like the city dumps, to light our path to history. We were apprehensive, not frightened. I was stil angry from my encounter with the sailor messman. I had been overlong eating my breakfast of beans, and when I had finished I had perceived the sailors frantical y cleaning up the gal ey. Perhaps this would become the ship’s surgery for the shore wounded. The chief messman behind the counter was just closing a crate of oranges, distributed as a sort of eve-of-battle gift to the troops, when I had rushed up to claim mine. He refused to reopen the crate. We shouted furiously at each other. I wanted that orange more than General Vandergrift wanted Guadalcanal. The sailor would not surrender it to me and threatened—oh, inanity of inanity!—threatened to report me for insolence. Report me! Report me who am about to spil my blood among the coconuts! I wanted to skewer him on my bayonet, but I thrust him aside, tore off the lid, seized my orange and fled up the ladder to my comrades on deck, the messman’s outraged cries dwindling behind me. So I was flickering, myself, like the long curving coastline of Guadalcanal, when Old Gunny bel owed: “First Platoon over the side! Down those cargo nets!” The George F. Elliott was rol ing in a gentle swel . The nets swayed out and in against her steel sides, bumping us. My rifle muzzle knocked my helmet forward over my eyes. Beneath me, the Higgins Boats wal owed in the troughs. The bombardment was lifting; I looked to both sides of me, clinging, antlike, to the net. Sealark Channel was choked with our ships. To the left, or west of me, was hulking Savo Island. In front of me, to the north, but obscured by the side of the Elliott, stretched Florida Island and tiny Tulagi. The Marine Raiders and Paramarines were already at their bloody work on Tulagi. I could hear the sound of gunfire. Behind me, to the south, was Guadalcanal. Three feet above the rol ing Higgins Boats the cargo nets came to an end. One had to jump, weighted with fifty or more pounds of equipment. No time for indecision, for others on the nets above were al but treading your fingers. So there it was—jump—hoping that the Higgins Boat would not rol away and leave only the blue sea to land in. But we al made it safely. Now I could see the assault waves forming near the other ships. Boat after boat would load up, then detach itself from the mother ship to join its mates, circling, circling, like monster water bugs on frolic. “Everybody down!”
Now I could see the circles fan out into the attack line. Like my buddies, I was crouching below the gunwales, feeling the boat beneath me swing slowly round to point its nose shoreward. The deck vibrated in a rush of power. The assault began.
Now I was praying again. I had prayed much the night before, careful y, deliberately, impetrating God and the Virgin to care for my family and friends should I fal . In the vanity of youth, I was positive I would die; in the same vanity, I was turning my affairs over to the Almighty, like an older brother clapping the younger on the back and saying, “John, now you’re the man of the house.” But my prayers were a jumble. I could think of nothing but the shoreline where we were to land. There were other boatloads of marines ahead of us. I fancied firing from behind their prostrate bodies, building a protecting wal of torn and reddened flesh. I could envision a holocaust among the coconuts. I no longer prayed. I was like an animal: ears straining for the sound of battle, body tensing for the leap over the side. The boat struck the shore, lurched, came to a halt. Instantly I was up and over. The blue sky seemed to swing in a giant arc. I had a glimpse of palm fronds swaying gently above, the most delicate and exquisite sight I have ever seen. There fol owed a blur. It was a swiftly shifting kaleidoscope of form and color and movement. I lay panting on the sand, among the tal coconut trees, and realized I was wet up to the hips. I had gotten some twenty yards inland. But there was no fight.
The Japanese had run. We lay there, fanned out in battle array, but there was no one to oppose us. Within moments, the tension had relaxed. We looked around our exotic surroundings. Soon there were grins and wisecracks. “Hey, Lieutenant,” the Hoosier pouted, “this is a hel uva way to run a war.” Sergeant Thinface screamed shril y at someone opening a coconut. “You wanna get poisoned. Doncha know them things could be ful of poison?” Everyone laughed. Thinface was so stupidly literal. He had been briefed on Japanese propensities for booby-trapping or for poisoning water supplies; thus, the coconuts were poisoned. No one bothered to point out the obvious difficulties involved in poisoning Guadalcanal’s mil ions of coconuts. We just laughed—and went on husking the nuts, cracking the shel s, drinking the cool sweet coconut milk. Thinface could only glower, at which he was expert. From somewhere came the command: “Move out!” We formed staggered squads and slogged off. We left our innocence on Red Beach. It would never be the same. For ten minutes we had had something like bliss, a flood of wel -being fol owing upon our unspeakable relief at finding our landing unopposed. Even as we stepped from the white glare of the beach into the sheltering shade of the coconut groves, there broke out behind us the yammer of antiaircraft guns and the whine of speeding aircraft. The Japs had come. The war was on. It would never be the same.
We plodded through the heat-bathed patches of kunai grass. We crossed rivers. We recrossed them. We climbed hil s. We got into the jungle. We cut our passage with machetes or fol owed narrow, winding trails. We were lost every step of the way. At intervals we would pass little knots of officers, bending anxiously over a map. That pitiful map! Here there was Red Beach, which was right enough, and there was the Tenaru River, which it was not, and there were the coconut groves—miles and miles of them, neatly marked out by symbols looking more like fleurs-de-lis than coconuts—and you would think this whole vast island was under cultivation by Lever Brothers. It was a lying map and it got us into trouble from the outset. The officers were apprehensive.
They knew we were lost.
“Hey, Lieutenant—where we headed?”
“Grassy Knol .”
“Where’zat?”
“Up ahead, where the Japs are.”
Our very naïveté spoke. Grassy Knol … up ahead … where the Japs are. Cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek—we were playing a game. Even the division commander had calmly announced an expectation of taking his evening meal on the summit of Grassy Knol .

“Synchronize your watches, gentlemen—the assault has begun.”
Last one up to Grassy Knol is a rotten egg. Ah, wel , we had much to learn, and five months in which to learn it; and there would be precious few who would get to Grassy Knol in the process. So began, on the very first day, the frustration. So, too, began the loneliness. The sounds of battle subsiding behind us had an ominous tinge, the faces of the officers we passed had an anxious tone. The Jap was closing the ring, and we—poor gal ant fools—we thought we were pursuing him! We were drenched with sweat. Our progress through the kunai patches had nearly prostrated us. Now, in the clammy cool of the rain forest, our sweat- darkened dungarees clung to us with chil tenacity. “Hey, Lucky,” the Hoosier cal ed. “Ah bet Ah could get a quart of Calvert off your back. Wring out your jacket, Lucky, and give ever’-body a shot.” It was not whiskey we wanted, though. For the first time in my life I was experiencing real thirst. The heat, and now the dripping, enervating forest, seemed to have dehydrated me. I had water in my canteen, but I dared not touch it. Who could tel when it might be replenished? We had been walking three hours or more, and had seen no water. Then, in that sudden way of the jungle, there was revealed to us a swift-running river. With incautious shouts we fel upon her. She dissolved us, this river. We became a yel ing, splashing, swil ing, mil ing mass, and even Lieutenant Ivy- League shared the general retreat from discipline. Oh, what a sweet sight would we have been for Japanese eyes! What a chance for massacre they missed!
Some even lay on their backs in this shal ow stream—the lyrical y named Ilu—and opened their mouths, letting the water plunge into their systems as though into yawning drains. Lieutenant Ivy-League was swinging water to his lips by the helmetful, bel owing meanwhile, “Don’t drink! It may be poisoned! Don’t drink until you’ve used your purifying pil s.” Everyone nodded gravely and went right ahead with the orgy, drinking, drinking, drinking—sighing like a lover as the sweet, swift little river swept the salt sweat from our bodies.
Refreshed, sated, we resumed the march.
We were sopping. But it was the clean wetness of water. It is nothing to be sopping in the jungle rain forest, and it is better if it be water than sweat. Night came in a rush while we were stil marching. We set up a hasty defense. The first day had passed without event, though we had lost one man. He had been wide on the flank of our advancing column and had simply disappeared. It began to rain, while we set up our guns on top of a hil . The rain fel drearily as we sat hunched in our ponchos, bidden to keep silence, munching the cold rations we took from our packs—each man to himself alone, but al afloat on a dark sea of the night. It could—it should—have been a night of purest terror. We were bewildered. We were dispirited. We were cold. We were wet. We were ignorant of our surroundings, so we were afraid of them. We knew nothing of our enemy, so we feared him. We were alone, surrounded by a jungle alive with the noise of moving things which could only seem to us the stealthy tread of the foe moving closer. But we saw al these things dul y, as a stunned boxer gaping with indifferent anticipation at the oncoming knockout blow, too paralyzed by previous punches to move, too stupefied to care. The steady drumfire of the day’s events had done this to us. Once there came a burst of gunfire. It shattered the night. We leaned over our guns, our mouths agape in the darkness. But then the night closed in again. Darkness. The trees dripping. The jungle whispering. No one came.
At dawn we learned the import of the gunfire. A medical corpsman had been kil ed. He had been shot by his own men. When the sentry had chal enged him as he returned from relieving himself, he had boggled over the password “Lil iputian” and so met death: eternity at the mercy of a liquid consonant.
I shal never forget the sad faces of the friends who buried him. In that dismal dawn, the scraping of their entrenching tools was as plaintive as the scratching of a mouse.
The light was stil dim. Lieutenant Ivy-League asked the company commander for permission to smoke. “I don’t know if it’s light enough,” said the captain. “Why don’t you go over by that tree and light a match? Then I can tel if it’s too dark.” The lieutenant strode off. When he had reached the tree and lighted his match, we could just make out the tiny flare of it and hear him cal ing softly, “How’s that, Captain?”
The captain shook his head.
“No. Keep the smoking lamp out. It’s too dark, yet.” I peered at the captain. Anxiety was on his face as though carved there by the night’s events. It startled me. Here was no warrior, no veteran of a hundred battles. Here was only a civilian, like myself. Here was a man hardly more confident than the trigger-happy sentry who had kil ed the corpsman. He was much older than I, but the responsibility of his charge, the unknown face of war, had frightened him past trusting the evidence of his senses. He thought the tiny flare of matches might bring the enemy down on us, as though we were lighting campfires at night. In another minute, it was clear daylight; everyone was smoking; soon the captain was, too. We marched al day. Grassy Knol was stil “up ahead” and so were the Japs. We squirmed up the side of rain-bright hil s, in slow sideways progress, like a land crab or a skier; we slid down the reverse slopes, the poor gunners cursing weakly while their tripods banged cruel y against the backs of their heads. The terrain of Guadalcanal seemed composed of steel, over which the demons of the jungle had spread a thin treacherous slime. Our feet were forever churning for a purchase on these undulating paths, our hands forever clawing the air, our progress constantly marked by the heavy clanking fal of a gunner in ful gear.
We advanced on the enemy with al the stealth of a circus. If there had been a foeman in that dim dripping jungle he would have annihilated us. The Japanese would have done to us what our military ancestor, Washington, prevented the French from doing completely to Braddock, what our forefathers did to the British on the retreat from Lexington. We saw none of the enemy. That day was a dul , lost witness to the cycle of the sun, of which I have neither memory nor regret. The night I shal never forget.
I awoke in the middle of it to see the sky on fire. So it seemed. It was like the red mist of my childhood dream when I imagined Judgment to have come while I played basebal on the Castle Grounds at home. We were bathed in red light, as though fixed in the eye of Satan. Imagine a myriad of red traffic lights glowing in the rain, and you wil have a replica of the world in which I awoke. The lights were the flares of the enemy. They hung above the jungle roof, swaying gently on their parachutes, casting their red glow about. Motors throbbed above. They were those of Japanese seaplanes, we learned later. We thought they were hunting us. But they were actual y the eyes of a mighty enemy naval armada that had swept into Sealark Channel. Soon we heard the sound of cannonading, and the island trembled beneath us. There came flashes of light—white and red—and great rocking explosions. The Japs were hammering out one of their greatest naval victories. It was the Battle of Savo Island, what we learned to cal more accurately the Battle of the Four Sitting Ducks. They were sinking three American cruisers—the Quincy, Vincennes and Astoria—and one Australian cruiser—the Canberra—as

wel as damaging one other American cruiser and a U.S. destroyer.
The flares had been to il uminate the fight. At one point, the Japanese turned their searchlights on. These accounted for the eerie lights we saw, as we huddled in our slimy jungle.
It took us hardly a day to withdraw from the rain forest, although we had spent two days getting into it. But we knew the way back; we had not known the way in.
Amphibious tractors laden with food and water awaited us when we emerged and came down the slopes into the kunai fields. Chuckler was in front of me. He slipped on the last slope. As he fel , his tripod caught him wickedly behind the head. He got up and kicked it. Then he swore. He swore with the shril fury of exasperation. He bent and grasped the tripod as though it were a living thing and he had it by the throat, turning his wrists to it as though he could choke the life from it —this hard cruel unbending thing in which was now concentrated the frustration, the hunger, the thirst, the wetness and the anxieties of these past two days. He flung it then. It sailed through the air and landed with an uncaring clank in the tal kunai. Chuckler sat down and lit a cigarette, and that was where the battalion deployed as the men came spil ing down from the hil s in their mud-caked formless green twil , with their ugly cartridge belts and bowl helmets, their slung rifles and their stubble of beard, and the eyes that were just beginning to stare. Water and cans of C-rations came streaming off the amtracks. When we had refil ed our canteens and our bel ies, and sucked at blessed cigarettes, we were up again and off.
It was dusk when we reached the beach. We saw wrecked and smoking ships—a clean, unshipped expanse of water between Guadalcanal and Florida Island.
Our Navy was gone.
Gone.
We rested there. Columns of men were trudging up the beach. Their feet clapped softly against the sand. The sun had sunk behind the jungle. Night rol ed toward us from the eastward-lying sea, gathering purplish over Florida as though it would come upon us in a bound. Silhouetted against the gathering dark were the men. In the half light, they seemed to have lost the dimension of depth; they seemed shades. They moved, these weary men, as though chained to one another, with the soul ess, mechanical tread of zombies. Behind them, low on the horizon, the reflected sun glowed dul y. Despair seemed to walk in desolation. I was glad when night closed in. Then my company was on its feet in turn, plodding up the silent beach in darkness. We took up defensive positions. We scooped out shal ow emplacements and turned the mouths of our machine guns toward the sea. We told off a guard and went to sleep, the last sound in our ears the pound of the surf against that long low coastline. They bombed us the next day. But it was nothing to fear. It was not even the foretaste of how it would be. “Condition Red!” someone shouted, and we heard the drone of their engines. They were high above, perhaps a dozen or so bombers, silvery and slender. They swept above us in a splendid V and loosed their loads over Henderson Field. We shouted and danced about in derision. We were fools. The bombs were not for us, but for our poor comrades on the airfield. We could hear the explosions and feel the earth shake, but it was not enough to make a child blink.
In that stupidity born of false security we laughed and shook our fists at the now departing bombers, as though we had taken their worst and put them to flight.
Ah, wel . We had much to learn.
Not even the excitement of the bombing could match the delirium fol owing discovery of the Japanese sake cache. Case upon case of it was found in a log-and-thatch warehouse not far west of our beach positions. There were cases of wonderful Japanese beer, too —quart bottles clothed in little skirts of straw. Soon the dirt road paral eling the shoreline became an Oriental thoroughfare, thronged with dusty, grinning marines pushing rickshaws piled high with bal oon-like half-gal on bottles of sake and cases of beer. There was food at the warehouse, too; huge tins of flour and rice and smal er cans of fish heads, those ghastly delicacies of Nippon. But no one took the food.
Besides, each squad had set up its own mess. We had our own flour and Spam and cans of peaches and sugar and coffee—al stolen in raids on the piles of food which had been hastily unloaded by the transports, fleeing the armada that sank the cruisers. Our ship had been set aflame the day we landed when a Zero crashed amidships. So we had no battalion mess. Marvelously, these little squad messes sprang up al along the beach. The provender was of the best that could be stolen. With these, and the sake and beer, we lived a rol icking, boisterous life for about a week, until the liquor ran out and the Major came around to commandeer the food.
What a wonderful week it was! What a delicious way to fight a war! Chuckler, Hoosier, Runner and I had buried our sake and beer in the sands, deep down where the sea had seeped and where it was cool. It was our cache, and no one else could touch it. So it was the four of us who drank the most of it, except when the drink within us enkindled the warmth of generosity. Then we invited others into the circle.
We sat squatting. Because the huge sake bottles were difficult to pour, we had to push them to one another, and we drank by turns, as the Indians smoke the peace pipe. But our method needed the skil s of a contortionist. One would grasp the huge bottle between one’s thighs, and then, with one’s head bent forward so that one’s mouth embraced the bottleneck, one would rol backward, al owing the cool white wine to pour down the throat. Oh, it was good!
My palate was not at al sophisticated, yet no mere refinement of taste could ever match the sheer exuberance flowing from every mouthful of that sake. It is glorious to drink the wine of the enemy. And we were getting gloriously drunk.
After one of these nocturnal drinking bouts I retired tipsily to my sleeping quarters; that is, I rol ed back a few feet from the circle and fel into the shal ow depression I had scooped out of the ground. High above me sighed the palm fronds, like lovely asterisks through which filtered the soft and starlit tropic night. I fel asleep. I awoke to the tiny twanging of hordes of invisible insects winging over my chest. I realized they were bul ets when I heard the sound of firing to my rear. I went back to sleep, sadly convinced that the Japanese had got behind us. Such was the power of sake.
In the morning someone explained that the firing had been two companies of the Fifth Regiment, each mistaking the other for the enemy. “Trigger- happy,” he said. I believed him. He needed no authority. He had a theory, which was the only authority required on Guadalcanal. Morning was the best time for the beer; it was cool with the cool of night and the dark sea beneath the sands. Oakstump did not last long with the beer. It was not that he drank so much, but that he drank it so fast—which is the same thing, perhaps. He arose unsteadily from our circle, stepped from the shade and keeled over almost the instant the sun touched his head. We adorned his body with palm fronds and stood an empty sake bottle on his chest so that he resembled a Shinto shrine. Then Hoosier became solemnly aware that he was not properly dressed. He had no trousers on. Such a breach of decorum, even in the company of

men not customarily correct in these matters, seemed to pain the Hoosier. He lurched to his feet, groped for his missing trousers and staggered down to
the water.
“Hey, Hoosier—where you going with those pants? You going to wash your pants, Hoosier?” “Ah’m gonna put mah pants on.”
“In the water?”
He showed his big strong teeth in a sil y grin: “Ah always put mah pants on in the ocean.” His dignity was matchless. Each time the surf receded, he would place his left foot in the trouser leg. With the exaggerated care of the inebriate, he would draw that leg up, and then, while balanced precariously on the right foot, a wave would pound up behind him and smack him on his pink behind. He arose each time in dignity. Gravely, he would go through it once more. Merrily, the wave would rol up again and let him have it. Once or twice, he would teeter for a moment on that disloyal right foot, looking quickly behind him with a half grin, as though to see if his old friend the wave were stil there. It always was.
Such was the power of Japanese beer.
Since that first day we had been bombed regularly; at least once, often several times daily. Enemy naval units began to appear in the channel. Contemptuous of our power to retaliate, they sailed in and bombarded us in broad daylight. The Japanese were returning to the battle. To protect vital Henderson Field against an enemy who seemed determined now to fight for Guadalcanal, special nocturnal patrols were required. The first time that my company was commanded to furnish the patrol marked the end of our drinking, and our careers as beachcombers came crashing to a close in tragicomic style.
It was the day our liquor ran out I was among those who joined the other men from our company and marched away from the beach, through the coconut grove, into the kunai, and so to the point we would defend outside Henderson Field. In front of me marched No-Behind. He was a tal , slender, noisy fel ow from Michigan who was oddly capable of exasperating anyone in H Company merely by marching in front of him. It was an odd affliction in that it was no affliction: No-Behind actual y seemed not to have a behind. So long and flat were his hips that his cartridge belt seemed always in danger of slipping to his ankles. No curve of bone or flare of flesh was there to arrest it. He seemed to walk without bending the knees of his long thin legs, and most maddening, where his trousers should have bulged with the familiar bulk of a behind, they seemed to sag inward! When to this was added a girlish voice that seemed forever raised in high-pitched profanity, there emerged an epicene quality which enraged those unlucky enough to march behind No-Behind. Often I quivered to draw my bayonet and skewer No-Behind where his behind was not. This day, as we passed with fixed bayonets through the kunai toward the line of wood beyond which a round red sun had fal en, Corporal Smoothface marched behind No-Behind. Smoothface was drunk on the last of the sake. He seemed to be babbling happily enough, when, suddenly, with a crazy yel , he lowered his rifle and drove the bayonet at No-Behind. We thought Smoothface had kil ed him, for No-Behind’s scream had been that of a dying man. But, fortunately for No-Behind, his very insufficiency in the target area had saved him; the bayonet passed through his trousers without even breaking the flesh, and it had not been the cutting edge of the bayonet but the hard round feel of the rifle muzzle that had provoked his expiring shout. Smoothface found it so funny he had to sit down to contain his laughter. Then, as he arose, a battery of artil ery concealed in the wood gave nerve- jangling voice. They were our seventy-five-mil imeter howitzers, shooting at what, we did not know, for they shot frequently and we never knew if they were merely registering terrain or actual y blasting the enemy. But the sudden crash of field pieces is always a disturbing thing, even if the guns turn out to be friendly.
Smoothface bared his smal , even teeth in an animal snarl. He unlimbered his rifle again, and returned the fire. That was the end of the Guadalcanal Campaign for Corporal Smoothface. He was led away under guard. But he had one last glorious round remaining. Placed in the rear of a captain’s jeep, he rose to his feet, abusing him. “Ah’l never ride with Captain Headlines,” he swore, and as he swore it, the jeep leapt forward. Smoothface was ejected in a slow somersault into the air, came down on his ankle, broke it and was taken to the hospital, where, that very night, a rare transport landed on our airfield. He was evacuated to New Zealand, was cured, given a light brig sentence, and final y turned loose to browse among the fleshpots of Auckland. His broken ankle, although perhaps not honorably suffered, was the very first of the “beer wounds,” which al veterans covet so mightily—those merely superficial holes or cuts or breaks which take a man out of battle and into the admiring glances and free drinks of civilization. It was stil light over the airfield when we left it and stepped into the gloom of the jungle. It was as though one had walked from a lighted, busy street into the murk and silence of a church, except that here was no reverence or smel of candle-grease, but the beginning of dread and the odor of corruption. We were told off at staggered intervals of about ten yards. I have no idea how many men were on the patrol, perhaps slightly more than a hundred of us, of which some thirty would have been from H Company. We never knew these things. Al that we knew was that in front of us lay the dark and moving jungle and quite probably the enemy, behind us the airfield in which reposed absolutely al of Guadalcanal’s military value. Our entrenching tools made muffled noises while we scooped foxholes out of the jungle floor. It was like digging into a compost heap ten thousand years old. Beneath this perfection of corruption lay a dark rich loam. We had barely finished when night fel , abruptly, blackly, like a shade drawn swiftly down from jungle roof to jungle floor. We slipped into the foxholes. We lay down and waited. It was a darkness without time. It was an impenetrable darkness. To the right and the left of me rose up those terrible formless things of my imagination, which I could not see because there was no light. I could not see, but I dared not close my eyes lest the darkness crawl beneath my eyelids and suffocate me. I could only hear. My ears became my being and I could hear the specks of life that crawled beneath my clothing, the rotting of the great tree which rose from its three-cornered trunk above me. I could hear the darkness gathering against me and the silences that lay between the moving things. I could hear the enemy everywhere about me, whispering to each other and cal ing my name. I lay open-mouthed and half-mad beneath that giant tree. I had not looked into its foliage before the darkness and now I fancied it infested with Japanese. Everything and al the world became my enemy, and soon my very body betrayed me and became my foe. My leg became a creeping Japanese, and then the other leg. My arms, too, and then my head. My heart was alone. It was me. I was my heart. It lay quivering, I lay quivering, in that rotten hole while the darkness gathered and al creation conspired for my heart. How long? I lay for an eternity. There was no time. Time had disintegrated in that black void. There was only emptiness, and that is Something; there was only being; there was only consciousness. Like the light that comes up suddenly in a darkened theatre, daylight came quickly. Dawn came, and so myself came back to myself. I could see the pale outlines of my comrades to right and left, and I marveled to see how tame my tree could be, how unforbidding could be its branches. I know now why men light fires.
Urgency and a certain air of inquiry and reproach characterized the manner of the Major as he drove his jeep through the coconuts, stopping at each squad mess along the line to commandeer the provender. Except for the urgency, he might have been a scoutmaster scolding his charges for having eaten their lunch by midmorning.
The Major’s tour marked the death of the squad messes. Our brief escape from battalion authority was ended, and a battalion gal ey was being set up.

But the Major found precious little food to cart off to a pyramidal tent which was set up about two hundred yards in from the beach. This was where we ate,
and this was where we were introduced to our new diet of rice. The food had belonged to the enemy, and so had the wooden bowls from which we ate it. We preferred these to our own mess gear with its maddening capacity for making al food taste like metal. We ate a bowl of rice for breakfast and had the same for supper. Once a marine complained of worms in the rice to one of our two doctors. “They’re dead,” he laughed. “They can’t hurt you. Eat them, and be glad you have fresh meat.” He was joking, but he was serious. No one resented it. Everyone thought the doctor had a good sense of humor. The day after our diet of rice began, the Major’s unwonted urgency became clear to us. We were ordered up from the beach to new positions on the west bank of the Tenaru River. Our orders commanded us to urgency. The enemy was expected.

2
The Tenaru River lay green and evil, like a serpent, across the palmy coastal plain. It was cal ed a river, but it was not a river; like most of the streams of Oceania, it was a creek—not thirty yards wide. Perhaps it was not even a creek, for it did not always flow and it seldom reached its destination, the sea. Where it might have emptied into Iron Bottom Bay, a spit of sand, some forty feet wide, penned it up. The width of the sandspit varied with the tides, and sometimes the tide or the wind might cause the Tenaru to rise, when, slipping over the spit, it would fal into the bosom of the sea, its mother. Normal y, the Tenaru stood stagnant, its surface crested with scum and fungus; evil, I said, and green. If there are river gods, the Tenaru was inhabited by a baleful spirit.
Our section—two squads, one with the Gentleman as gunner, the other with Chuckler as gunner and me as assistant—took up position approximately three hundred yards upstream from the sandspit. As we dug, we had it partial y in view; that is, what would be cal ed the enemy side of the sandspit. For the Tenaru marked our lines. On our side, the west bank, was the extremity of the marine position; on the other, a no-man’s-land of coconuts through which an attack against us would have to pass. The Japanese would have to force the river to our front; or come over the narrow sandspit to our left, which was wel defended by riflemen and a number of machine gun posts and barbed wire; or else try our right flank, which extended only about a hundred yards south of us, before curving back north to the Tenaru’s narrowest point, spanned by a wooden bridge. The emplacement for the Gentleman’s gun was excel ently located to rake the coconut grove opposite. We dug it first, leaving Chuckler’s and my gun standing some twenty yards downstream, above the ground, protected by a single strand of barbed wire strung midway down the steeply sloping river bank. We would emplace it next day.
We dug the Gentleman’s gun pit wide and deep—some ten feet square and five feet down—for we wanted the gunner to be able to stand while firing, and we wanted the pit to serve as a bomb shelter as wel , for the bombs were fal ing fiercer. But furiously as we worked, naked to the waist, sweat streaming so steadily our belts were turned sodden, we were unable to finish the pit on the first day. When night fel , only the excavation was done, plus a dirt shelf where the gun was placed. We would have to wait for the next day to roof it over with coconut logs.
We felt exposed in our half-finished fortifications, unsure. The dark made sinister humpbacks of the piles of soft red earth we had excavated, and on which we sat.
But, because we did not know real battle—its squal ish trick of suddenness—we could not feel foreboding as we sat atop the soft mounds, concealing the tel tale coals of our bitter Japanese cigarettes in cupped hands, softly smoking, softly talking. We were uneasy only in that shiftiness that came each night and disappeared each dawn.
No one went to bed. The stars were out, and this was enough to keep everyone up, unwil ing to waste a bright night. Suddenly in the river, upstream to our right, there appeared a widening, rippling V. It seemed to be moving steadily downstream. At the point of the V were two greenish lights, smal , round, close together. Jawgia whooped and fired his rifle at it. To our right came a fusil ade of shots. It was from G Company riflemen, shooting also at the V. More bul ets hit the water. The V disappeared. The stars vanished. The night darkened. Like our voices, the men began to trail off to bed, wrapping themselves in their ponchos and lying on the ground a few yards behind the pit. Only the Chuckler and myself were left, to stand watch. Lights—swinging, bumping lights, like lanterns or headlights—glittered across the river in the grove. It was fantastic, a truck there, as though we might awake next morning and find a railroad station confronting us across that stagnant stream. The coconut grove was no-man’s-land. The enemy had a right to be there, but, by al the experience of jungle warfare, it was inviting death to mark himself with lights, to let his truck wheels shout “Here we are!” “Who goes there?” the Chuckler bel owed. The lights bumped and swung serenely on. “Who goes there? Answer, or I’l let you have it!” The lights went out.
This was too much. Everyone was awake. The mysterious V in the river and now these ghostly lights—it was too much! We jabbered excitedly, and once again warmed our souls in the heat of our voices. Shattering machine gun fire broke out far to the left. As far down as the sandspit, perhaps. There came another burst. Again. Another. The sharply individual report of the rifle punctuated the uproar. There fol owed the “plop” of heavy mortars being launched behind us, then the crunching roar of their detonation across the Tenaru. The conflagration was sweeping toward us up the river, like a train of powder. It was upon us in an instant, and then we were firing. We were so disorganized we had not the sense to disperse, clustering around that open pit as though we were born of it. Falsetto screeching rose directly opposite us and we were blasting away at it, sure that human intruders had provoked the cry of the birds. I helped the Gentleman fire his gun, although I was not his assistant. He concentrated on the river bank, firing burst after burst there, convinced that the Japs were preparing to swim the river. The screeching stopped. The Gentleman spoke softly. “Tel those clucks to quit firing. Tel them to wait until they hear the birds making a clatter, ‘cause a smart man’d try to move under cover of it. That’s when they’l be moving.” I was glad he gave me this little order to execute. I was having no fun standing in the pit, watching the Gentleman fire. I crawled out and told everyone what he had said. They ignored it and kept banging away. There came a lul , and in that silent space, I, who had had no chance to fire my own weapon, blasted away with my pistol. I leaned over the mound and shoved my pistol-clenching hand into the dark and emptied the clip. There came a roar of anger from the Hoosier.
“Dammit, Lucky, ain’t you got no better sense’n to go firing past a fel ow’s ear? You like to blow my head off, you Jersey jerk!” I laughed at him, and the Chuckler crawled back from the bank and whispered, “C’mon, let’s get our gun.” We snaked up the bank on our bel ies, for the night was alive with the angry hum of bul ets. The Chuckler took the gunner’s spot and I crouched alongside in the position to keep the gun fed. We had plenty of ammunition, the long two hundred and fifty-round belts coiled wickedly in the light green boxes, those same sturdy boxes which you now see slung on the shoulders of shoeshine boys. The Chuckler fired and the gun slumped forward out of his hands, digging its snout into the dirt, knocking off the flash hider with a disturbing clatter, spraying our own area with bul ets.
“That yel ow-bel y!” the Chuckler cursed. He cursed a certain corporal who was not then distinguishing himself for bravery, and who had set up the gun and done it so sloppily that the tripod had col apsed at the first recoil.
I crawled down the slope and straightened it. I leaned hard on the clamps. “She’s tight,” I told the Chuckler.

His answer was a searing burst that streaked past my nose.
A man says of the eruption of battle: “Al hel broke loose.” The first time he says it, it is true—wonderful y descriptive. The mil ionth time it is said, it has been worn into meaninglessness: it has gone the way of al good phrasing, it has become cliché. But within five minutes of that first machine gun burst, of the appearance of that first enemy flare that suffused the battlefield in unearthly greenish light —and by its dying accentuated the reenveloping night—within five minutes of this, al hel broke loose. Everyone was firing, every weapon was sounding voice; but this was no orchestration, no terribly beautiful symphony of death, as decadent rear-echelon observers write. Here was cacophony; here was dissonance; here was wildness; here was the absence of rhythm, the loss of limit, for everyone fires what, when and where he chooses; here was booming, sounding, shrieking, wailing, hissing, crashing, shaking, gibbering noise. Here was hel . Yet each weapon has its own sound, and it is odd with what clarity the trained ear distinguishes each one and catalogues it, plucks it out of the general din, even though it be intermingled or coincidental with the voice of a dozen others, even though one’s own machine gun spits and coughs and dances and shakes in choleric fury. The plop of the outgoing mortar with the crunch of its fal , the clatter of the machine guns and the lighter, faster rasp of the Browning Automatic Rifles, the hammering of fifty-caliber machine guns, the crash of seventy-five-mil imeter howitzer shel s, the crackling of rifle fire, the wham of thirty-seven-mil imeter anti-tank guns firing point-blank canister at the charging enemy—each of these conveys a definite message, and
sometimes meaning, to the understanding ear, even though that ear be fil ed with the total wail of battle. So it was that our ears prickled at strange new sounds: the lighter, shingle-snapping crack of the Japanese rifle, the gargle of their extremely fast machine guns, the hiccup of their light mortars. To our left, a stream of red tracers arched over to the enemy bank. Distance and the cacophony being raised around us seemed to invest them with silence, as though they were bul ets fired in a deaf man’s world. “It’s the Indian’s gun,” I whispered.
“Yeah. But those tracers are bad stuff. I’m glad we took ‘em out of our belts. He keeps up that tracer stuff, and they’l spot him, sure.” They did.
They set up heavy machine guns in an abandoned amtrack on their side of the river and they kil ed the Indian. Their slugs slammed through the sandbags. They ate their way up the water-jacket of his gun and they ate their way into his heart. They kil ed him, kil ed the Indian kid, the flat-faced, anonymous prizefighter from Pittsburgh. He froze on the trigger with their lead in his heart; he was dead, but he kil ed more of them. He wasn’t anonymous, then; he wasn’t a prelim boy, then. They wounded his assistant. They blinded him. But he fought on. The Marines gave him the Navy Cross and Hol ywood made a picture about him and the Tenaru Battle. I guess America wanted a hero fast, a live one; and the Indian was dead. The other guy was a hero, make no mistake about it; but some of us felt sad that the poor Indian got nothing. It was the first organized Japanese attack on Guadalcanal, the American fighting man’s first chal enge to the Japanese “superman.” The “supermen” put bul ets into the breast of the Indian, but he fired two hundred more rounds at them. How could the Marines forget the Indian? Now we had tracer trouble of a different kind. We had begun to take turns firing, and I was on the gun. The tracers came toward me, alongside me. Out of the river dark they came. You do not see them coming. They are not there; then, there they are, dancing around you on tiptoe; sparkles gay with the mirth of hel .
They came toward me, and time stretched out. There were but a few bursts, I am sure, but time was frozen while I leaned away from them. “Chuckler,” I whispered. “We’d better move. It looks like they’ve got the range. Maybe we ought to keep moving. They won’t be able to get the range that way. And maybe they’l think we’ve got more guns than we real y have.” Chuckler nodded. He unclamped the gun and I slipped it free of its socket in the tripod. Chuckler lay back and pul ed the tripod over him. I lay back and supported the gun on my chest. We moved backward, like backstroke swimmers, almost as we had moved when we stole the case of beer out of the North Carolina shanty, trying, meanwhile, to avoid making noise that might occur during one of those odd and suspenseful times of silence that befal s battles—noise which might attract fire from the opposite bank—if anyone was there. For, you see, we never knew if there real y was anyone there. We heard noises; we fired at them. We felt shel s explode on our side and heard enemy bul ets; but we could not be sure of their point of origin. But, now, there was no enemy fire while we squirmed to our new position. We set up the gun once more and resumed firing, tripping our bursts at sounds of activity as before. We remained here fifteen minutes, then sought a new position. Thus we passed the remainder of the battle; moving and firing, moving and firing.
Dawn seemed to burst from a mortar tube. The two coincided; the rising bombardment of our mortars and the arrival of light. We could see, now, that the coconut grove directly opposite us had no life in it. There were bodies, but no living enemy. But to the left, toward the ocean and across the Tenaru, the remnant of this defeated Japanese attacking force was being annihilated. We could see them, running. Our mortars had got behind them. We were walking our fire in; that is dropping shel s to the enemy’s rear, then lobbing the projectile steadily closer to our own lines, so that the unfortunate foe was forced to abandon cover after cover, being drawn inexorably toward our front, where he was at last flushed and destroyed.
We could see them flitting from tree to tree. The Gentleman’s gun was in excel ent position to enfilade. He did. He fired long bursts at them. Some of us fired our rifles. But we were out of the fight, now; way off on the extreme right flank. We could add nothing to a situation so obviously under control. “Hold your fire,” someone from G Company shouted at the Gentleman. “First Battalion coming through.” Infantry had crossed the Tenaru at the bridge to our right and were fanning out in the coconut grove. They would sweep toward the ocean. Light tanks were crossing the sandspit far to the left, leading a counterattack. The Japanese were being nailed into a coffin. Everyone had forgotten the fight and was watching the carnage, when shouting swept up the line. A group of Japanese dashed along the opposite river edge, racing in our direction. Their appearance so surprised everyone that there were no shots. We dived for our holes and gun positions. I jumped to the gun which the Chuckler and I had left standing on the bank. I unclamped the gun and fired, spraying my shots as though I were handling a hose. Al but one fel . The first fel as though his underpart had been cut from him by a scythe, and the others fel tumbling, screaming. Once again our gun col apsed and I grabbed a rifle—I remember it had no sling—which had been left near the gun. The Jap who had survived was deep into the coconuts by the time I found him in the rifle sights. There was his back, bobbing large, and he seemed to be throwing his pack away. Then I had fired and he wasn’t there anymore.
Perhaps it was not I who shot him, for everyone had found their senses and their weapons by then. But I boasted that I had. Perhaps, too, it was a merciful bul et that pounded him between the shoulder blades; for he was fleeing to a certain and horrible end: black nights, hunger and slow dissolution in the rain forest. But I had not thought of mercy then. Modern war went forward in the jungle.
Men of the First Battalion were cleaning up. Sometimes they drove a Japanese toward us. He would cower on the river bank, hiding; unaware that opposite him were we, already the victors, numerous, heavily armed, lusting for more blood. We kil ed a few more this way. The Fever was on us.

Down on the sandspit the last nail was being driven into the coffin.
Some of the Japanese threw themselves into the channel and swam away from that grove of horror. They were like lemmings. They could not come back. Their heads bobbed like corks on the horizon. The marines kil ed them from the prone position; the marines lay on their bel ies in the sand and shot them through the head.
The battle was over.
Beneath a bright moon that night, the V reappeared in the river. The green lights gleamed malevolently. Someone shot at it. Rifle fire crackled along the line. The V vanished. We waited, tense. No one came. Lieutenant Ivy-League strode up to our pits in the morning. He sat on a coconut log and told us what had happened. He smoked desperately and stared into the river as he talked. The skin around his eyes was drawn tight with strain and with shock. His eyes had already taken on that aspect peculiar to Guadalcanal, that constant stare of pupils that seemed darker, larger, rounder, more absolute. It was particularly noticeable in the brown-eyed men. Their eyes seemed to get auburn, like the color of an Irish setter. “They tried to come over the sandspit,” the lieutenant said. “There must have been a thousand of them. We had only that one strand of wire and the guns. You should see them stacked up in front of Bitenail’s gun. Must be three deep. They were crazy. They didn’t even fire their rifles.” He looked at us. “We heard firing up here. What happened?” We told him. He nodded, but he was not listening; he was stil intent on that yel ing horde sweeping over the sandspit. When he spoke again it was to tel us who had been kil ed. There were more than a dozen from H Company, besides more than a score of wounded. Four or five of the dead were from our platoon. Two of them had been hacked to death. A Japanese scouting party had found them asleep in their hole on the river bank and sliced them into pieces.
It is not always or immediately saddening to hear “who got it.” Except for one’s close buddies, it is difficult to feel deep, racking grief for the dead, and now, hearing the lieutenant tol ing off the names, I had to force my face into a mask of mourning, deliberately adorn my heart with black, as it were, for I was shocked to gaze inward and see no sorrow there. Rather than permit myself to know myself a monster (as I seemed, then) I deliberately deluded myself by feigning bereavement. So did we al . Only when I heard the name of the doctor who had joked about the wormy rice did a real pang pierce my heart. Lieutenant Ivy-League arose, stil staring into the river, and said, “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got to write those letters.” He turned and left. We got the second gun emplaced that morning. Then, the Hoosier and I sneaked off to the beach. Our regiment had kil ed something like nine hundred of them. Most of them lay in clusters or heaps before the gun pits commanding the sandspit, as though they had not died singly but in groups. Moving among them were the souvenir hunters, picking their way delicately as though fearful of booby traps, while stripping the bodies of their possessions. Only the trappings of war change. Only these distinguish the Marine souvenir hunter, bending over the fal en Jap, from Hector denuding slain Patroclus of the borrowed armor of Achil es.
One of the marines went methodical y among the dead armed with a pair of pliers. He had observed that the Japanese have a penchant for gold fil ings in their teeth, often for solid gold teeth. He was looting their very mouths. He would kick their jaws agape, peer into the mouth with al the solicitude of a Park Avenue dentist—careful, always careful not to contaminate himself by touch—and yank out al that glittered. He kept the gold teeth in an empty Bul Durham tobacco sack, which he wore around his neck in the manner of an amulet. Souvenirs, we cal ed him. The thought of him and of the other trophy-takers suggested to me, as I returned from the pits, that across the river lay an unworked mine of souvenirs to which I might rightful y stake a claim.
When I had shot the Japanese fleeing down the river bank, something silver had flashed when the first one fel . I imagined it to be the sun’s reflection off an officer’s insignia. If he had been an officer, he must have been armed with a saber. This most precious prize of al the war I was determined to get. I slipped through the barbed wire and clambered down the bank. I left my clothes at the water’s edge, like a schoolboy on a summer’s day, and slipped into the water. I had a bayonet between my teeth; stil the schoolboy, fancying myself a bristling pirate. I swam breaststroke. Not even the fire of the enemy would induce me to put my face into that putrid stream. The water was thick with scum. My flesh crept while I swam, neck stiff and head erect like a swan’s, the cold feel of the bayonet between my teeth, and my saliva running fast around it so that it threatened to slip out at any moment.
I paddled careful y around the body of a big Japanese soldier, lying in the water with one foot caught in the underbrush. He swayed gently, like a beached rowboat. He seemed unusual y bloated, until I perceived that his blouse was stuffed with cooked rice and that his pants were likewise loaded to the knees, where he had tied leather thongs to keep the rice from fal ing out. “Chow hound,” I thought, and felt an odd affection for him. My feet touched the slime of the river bottom. I had to advance about three yards up the bank. My feet sank so deep in the soft mud I feared momentarily that I was in a bog. The mud came up to my calves and made greedy sucking sounds with every step, while surrendering little swarms of fiddler crabs that scuttled away in sideways flight.
Dead bodies were strewn about the grove. The tropics had got at them already, and they were beginning to spil open. I was horrified at the swarms of flies; black, circling funnels that seemed to emerge from every orifice: from the mouth, the eyes, the ears. The beating of their myriad tiny wings made a dreadful low hum.
The flies were in possession of the field; the tropics had won; her minions were everywhere, smacking their lips over this bounty of rotting flesh. Al of my elation at the victory, al of my fanciful cockiness fled before the horror of what my eyes beheld. It could be my corrupting body the white maggots were moving over; perhaps one day it might be. Holding myself stiffly, as though fending off panic with a straight arm, I returned to the river bank and slipped into the water. But not before I had stripped one of my victims of his bayonet and field glasses, both of which I slung across my chest, crisscross like a grenadier. I had found no saber. None of the dead men was an officer.
I swam back, eager to be away from that horrid grove. My comrades, who had covered my excursion with our guns, mistook my grimace of loathing for a grin of triumph, when, streaked with slime, I emerged from the Tenaru. They crowded around to examine my loot. Then, I went to chow. Coming back, I noticed a knot of marines, many from G Company, gathered in excitement on the riverbank. Runner rushed up to them with my new field glasses.
He had them to his eyes, as I came up. I thought he was squinting overhard, then I saw that he was actual y grimacing. I took the glasses from him and focused on the opposite shore, where I saw a crocodile eating the fat “chow-hound” Japanese. I watched in debased fascination, but when the crocodile began to tug at the intestines, I recal ed my own presence in that very river hardly an hour ago, and my knees went weak and I relinquished the glasses. That night the V reappeared in the river. Everyone whooped and hol ered. No one fired. We knew what it was. It was the crocodile. Three smal er V’s trailed afterward.
They kept us awake, crunching. The smel kept us awake. Even though we lay with our heads swathed in a blanket—which was how we kept off the mosquitoes—the smel overpowered us. Smel , the sense which somehow seems a joke, is the one most susceptible to outrage. It wil give you no rest.

One can close one’s eyes to ugliness or shield the ears from sound; but from a powerful smel there is no recourse but flight. And since we could not flee,
we could not escape this smel ; and we could not sleep. We never fired at the crocodiles, though they returned to their repast day after day until the remains were removed to the mass burning and burial which served as funeral pyre for the enemy we had annihilated. We never shot at the crocs because we considered them a sort of “river patrol.” Their appetite for flesh aroused, they seemed to promenade the Tenaru daily. No enemy, we thought, would dare to swim the river with them in it; nor would he succeed if he dared. We relied upon our imperfect knowledge of the habits of the crocodiles (“If they chase you, run zigzag: they can’t change direction.”) and a thick network of barbed wire to forestal their tearing us to pieces. Sometimes on black nights, in a spasm of fear, it might be imagined that the big croc was after us, like the crocodile with the clock inside of him who pursues Captain Hook in Peter Pan. So the crocodiles became our darlings, we never molested them. Nor did any of us ever swim the Tenaru again.

3
Our victory in the fight which we cal ed “The Battle of Hel ’s Point” was not so great as we had imagined it to be. It was to be but one of many fights for Guadalcanal, and, in the end, not the foremost of them. But being the first in our experience, we took it for total triumph; like those who take the present for the best of al worlds, having no reference to the past nor regard for the future. From the high plateau of triumph we were about to descend to the depths of trial and tedium. The Japanese attack was to be redoubled and prolonged and varied. It would come from the sky, the sea and the land. In between every trial there would stretch out the tedium that sucks a man dry, drawing off the juice from body and soul as a native removes the contents of a stick of sugar cane, leaving it spent, cracked, good for nothing but the flames. And there is terror, coming from the interaction of trial and tedium: the first, shaking a man as the wind in the treetops; the second, eroding him as the flood at the roots. Each fresh trial leaves a man more shaken than the last, and each period of tedium—with its time for speculative dread—leaves his foundations worn lower, his roots less firm for the next trial. Sometimes there is a final shattering: a man crouching in a pit beneath the bombardment of a battleship might put a pistol to his head and deliver himself. Sometimes it is partial; another man might break at the sound of a diving enemy plane and scream and shudder and wring his hands—and rise to run. This is the terror I mean; this is the terror that strangles reason with the clawing hands of panic. I saw it twice, I felt it pluck at me twice. But it was rare. It claimed few victims. Courage was a commonplace.
It formed a club or corporation, much as do those other common things upon which men, for diverse reasons, place so great a value; like money, like charity. For it is the common on which the exclusive rests. Our muddy machine gun pits were transformed into Courage Clubs when bombs fel or Japanese warships pounded us from the sea. There was protocol to be observed, too, and it was natural that the poor fel ow who might break into momentary terror should cause pained silences and embarrassed coughs. Everyone looked the other way, like mil ionaires confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dol ars from the waiter. But there was a bit more charity in our clubs, I think. We were not quite so puffed up that we could not recognize the ugly thing on our friend’s face as the elder brother of the thing fluttering within our own innards. You today, me tomorrow. A month had passed, and it seemed to us the fal ing bombs were as numerous as the flies around us. Three times a day and every Sunday morning (the Jap fixity of idea, nourished on the great success of Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor) the coconut grove was sibilant with the whispering of the bombs. It sounded like the confession of a giant.
At night Washing Machine Charlie picked up the slack. Washing Machine Charlie—so named for the sound of his motors—was the nocturnal marauder who prowled our skies. There may have been more than one Charlie—that is, more than one Nipponese pilot making the midnight run over our positions —but there was never more than one plane at a time overhead at night. That was al that was needed for such badgering work. Like the dog whose bark is worse than his bite, the throb of Charlie’s motors was more fearsome than the thump of his bombs. Once the bombs were dropped, we would be relieved, knowing he would be off and away. But the drone of Charlie’s circling progress kept everyone awake and uneasy for so long as Charlie cared—or dared. Dawn meant departure for Charlie, for then our planes could rise to chastise him, and he would become visible to our anti-aircraft batteries.
Charlie did not kil many people, but, like Macbeth, he murdered sleep. To these trials was added the worst ordeal: shel ing from the sea. Enemy warships—usual y cruisers, sometimes battleships—stand off your coast. It is night and you cannot see them, nor could you if it were day, for they are miles and miles away. Our airplanes cannot rise at night to meet them. Our seventy-five-mil imeter pack howitzers are as effectual as popguns opposing rifles. The enemy has everything his way. We could see the flashes of the guns far out to sea. We heard the soft pah-boom, pah-boom of the salvos. Then rushing through the night, straining like an airy boxcar, came the huge projectiles. The earth rocks and shakes upon the terrifying crash of the detonation, though it be hundreds of yards away. Your stomach is squeezed, as though a monster hand were kneading it into dough; you gasp for breath like the footbal player who fal s heavily and has the wind knocked out of him.
Flash. Pah-boom. Hwoo, hwoo-hwoee.
They’re lowering their sights … it’s coming closer … oh, that one was close … the sandbags are fal ing … I can’t hear it. I can’t hear the shel … it’s the one you don’t hear, they say, the one you don’t hear … where is it? … where is it? Flash! … Pah-boom! … Thank God … it’s lifted … it’s going the other way.
Dawn blinks across the river. They go. The planes on the airstrip behind us rise in pursuit. We emerge from the pits. Someone says he is thankful the bombardment continued al night, for if it had ceased, an attack by land might have fol owed. Someone else cal s him a fool. They argue. But nobody cares. It is daylight now and there are only the bombings to worry about—and the heat, and the mosquitoes, and the rice lying in the bel y like stones. The eyes are rounder. The tendency to stare is more pronounced. We hated working parties. We were weak with hunger. We manned the lines at night. By day, they formed us into working parties and took us to the airfield. We buried boxes of ammunition there. Digging deep holes, lugging the hundred-pound crates, we only got weaker. Once, returning from a working party, the bombers swept suddenly overhead. I fled before the crashing approach of the bombs they scattered throughout our grove. I leapt into a freshly dug slit trench with three others. I crouched there while roaring air squeezed my stomach. Behind me crouched another man, his face against my bare back. I felt his lips moving in prayer over my skin, the quivering kiss of fear and faith. When I returned to the pits, they told me that the other working party, the one that I had missed, had been obliterated by the bombs. That was when Manners died, and the gay Texan.
Chuckler made corporal. He made it in a battlefield promotion. Lieutenant Ivy-League had recommended him for a Silver Star for our work on the riverbank in the Hel ’s Point fight, specifying that our action in moving the gun from place to place may have discouraged an enemy flanking attack. The regimental commander reduced the citation to a promotion of one grade. Ivy-League had not mentioned me in his recommendation. I have no idea why not. Though it was Chuckler who had first grabbed our gun, it was I who had proposed the moves—and Ivy-League knew it. I resented being ignored, although I tried to conceal it, and Chuckler, embarrassed, did his best to pass over it, trying to make a joke of it. But he deserved both promotion and citation, for he was a born leader. I never forgave Ivy-League, and I think this marked the beginning of my dislike for him.

They brought us mosquito nets. We stil slept on the ground—a poncho under us if it was dry, over us if it was raining. But the mosquito nets were a boon. Now we could use our blankets to sleep on, rather than to guard our head against mosquitoes. The poncho could be rol ed up for a pil ow; if it rained, it went over us. But the nets real y came too late. We were ful of malaria. They brought in supplies. Each squad got a toothbrush, a package of razor blades and a bar of candy. We raffled them off. The Runner won the candy bar. Despairing of dividing it among ten men, he fel into a torment of indecision, until everyone assured him he should eat it himself. He slunk off to the underbrush to do so.
Oakstump continued to reinforce his private fort. Every time I saw him it seemed he had an ax in his hand or a coconut log on his shoulder. Once he carried a log so huge that it gouged a hole in his shoulder; a wound which, in civilization, would have required stitching. Everyone kept saying hopeful y that the army was coming in next week to relieve us. Everyone was in despair. We heard that the army relief force had been destroyed at sea. Chuckler and I visited the cemetery. It lay to the south off the coastal road that ran from east to west through the coconuts. We knelt to pray before the graves of the men we had known. Only palm fronds marked the place where they were buried, although here and there were rude crosses, on which were nailed the men’s identification tags. Some of the crosses bore mess gear tins, affixed to the wood like rude medal ions, and on those the marines had lovingly carved their epitaphs.
“He died fighting.”
“A real marine.”
“A big guy with a bigger heart.”
“Our Buddy.”
“The harder the going, the more cheerful he was.” There was this verse, which I have seen countless times, before and since, the direct and unpolished cry of a marine’s sardonic heart: And when he gets to Heaven
To St. Peter he will tell:
One more Marine reporting, sir—
I’ve served my time in Hell.
Other inscriptions, and most often the dead man’s name, were made by pressing bul ets into the ground, so that the round brass end of the cartridges gleamed above the earth. Chuckler and I lifted our gaze from the cemetery to encompass the entire level plain sweeping back to the hil s. Chuckler raised his eyebrows sardonical y.
“Plenty of room,” he said.
“That’s for sure,” I said.
We said a prayer before the grave of one of the dead from our own platoon. “You know,” Chuckler said, rising, “he had two hundred bucks in his kick before Hel ’s Point. He won it in a poker game.” “Yeah?”
“When they went to bury him he didn’t have a dime.” We plotted the death of a rat that had become attached to our machine gun pit. We swore we would kil it and have fresh meat. Its habit was to scurry across the gun embrasure, almost flitting, it moved so fast in the half light. It seemed the rat grew bolder as we grew weaker from hunger, until in our extremity it actual y sauntered across the embrasure! We never caught it. If we had, I doubt that we would have eaten it. One night we were shel ed by cruisers. A projectile landed in the river mud not far from us; the pit shook like jel y. No one spoke, until No-Behind said hopeful y, “Must be a dud.” I said, “Didn’t you ever hear of a delayed fuse?” and everybody giggled, except No-Behind, who drew his breath sobbingly. I had to slap him.
Another night—a very black night—we huddled in the pits while the sounds of battle came to us from the hil s on our right. We were alerted for an attack. We sat wonderingly the whole night, al of it, until morning brought the news that the first half of the battle of Bloody Ridge had been fought. The Japs had been repulsed.
When night fel again, the battle was resumed. We sat again in the black pit, waiting. This time there was almost no crackling of smal arms fire, only the thump and crash of artil ery—our artil ery, we hoped. We took turns peering from the pit for signs of the enemy on our front, or crawled out on the river bank for a better look. We could only hope the Raiders and Paramarines would hold, up there in that black-and-scarlet hel , where the issue had become so close that our own artil ery was fal ing upon our own positions, abandoned by the defending marines and overrun by the attackers. It was a most unbelievable barrage our one-hundred-and-five-mil imeters threw out. I was nowhere near either end of it, yet it made my teeth ache. Morning was a blessing. It chased away fear of the Japanese breaking our line up in the hil s, pouring through the gap, spil ing into the groves behind us. We knew the Japs had been beaten. Strange, how the anxiety of that vigil could be almost as wearing as the actual fight. The Hoosier said it next day.
We were gathered in the shade of the only tree on the river bank. Hoosier sat leaning against the trunk, whittling on a stick. He kept on plying the stick with his knife, slicing off long curly slivers of white wood, seeming not to care whether or not anyone heeded his words. “They’re gonna whittle us,” he said, shaping his sentences proportionate to the slivers. “They come in last night against the Raiders, same as they come in against us. Sure, we beat them. So’d the Raiders. But ever’ time we lose a few chips. Ever’ time we lose a couple hundred men. What do they care what they lose? Life is cheap with them. They got plenty more, anyway.” He waved the stick. “They got plenty of sticks, but we just got the one, we just got us. Fel ow from the Fifth came by this morning and said the Japs was unloading two more troop transports down at Kokum. They keep on whittlin’ us. Ever’ day we lose ten, twenty fel ows from the bombing. Ever’ night Washing Machine Charlie gets a couple. When they hit us with them battleships, I dunno how many we lose.
“But they got it al their own way,” he continued, grunting as the knife cut into a hard spot, “‘cause we ain’t got no ships and we ain’t got no airplanes ‘cept a coupla Grummans that cain’t get off the ground half the time because we ain’t got no gasoline. They got the ships and they got the airplanes and it looks like they got the time, too. So Ah’m tel ing you”—the knife cut through and the stick broke—“they’re gonna whittle us.” The Chuckler sought to make a joke of it. “What’s eating you? You never had it so good. Here’s a guy getting lamb’s tongue in his rice and he wants to get back to civilization and stand in them long lines for his war bonds. Whaddya want—egg in your beer?” “Don’t be a damn fool, Chuckler. Ah’m not kidding. They’re gonna wear us down.” “No egg in my beer,” said the Runner. “Just give it to me straight, just let me have mine in a nice tal glass like they have at the Staler. Carling’s. Carling’s Black Label.”

Hoosier arose and looked down at us with a glance of wearied exasperation. He strode away, and we sat there in silence. We felt like theology
students whose instructor takes his leave after presenting the most compel ing arguments against the existence of God. Our faith in victory had been unquestioning. Its opposite, defeat, had no currency among us. Victory was possible, that was al ; it would be easy or difficult, quick or prolonged, but it would be victory. So here came the disturbing Hoosier, displaying the other side of the coin: showing us defeat. It shook us, and it was from this moment that we dated the feeling of what is cal ed expendability. Al armies have expendable items. That is, a part or unit, the destruction of which wil not be fatal to the whole. In some ordeals, a man might consider his finger expendable, but not his hand; or, in extremity, his arm but not his heart. There are expendable items which may be lost or destroyed in the field, either in peace or in war, without their owner being required to replace them. A rifle is so expendable or a cartridge belt. So are men. Men are the most expendable of al .
Hunger, the jungle, the Japanese, not one nor al of these could be quite as corrosive as the feeling of expendability. This was no feeling of dedication because it was absolutely involuntary. I do not doubt that if the Marines had asked for volunteers for an impossible campaign such as Guadalcanal, almost everyone now fighting would have stepped forward. But that is sacrifice; that is voluntary. Being expended robs you of the exultation, the self-abnegation, the absolute freedom of self-sacrifice. Being expended puts one in the role of victim rather than sacrificer, and there is always something begrudging in this. I doubt if Isaac would have accepted the knife of his father, Abraham. entirely without reproach; yet, for the same Master, he would have gone gladly to his death a thousand times. The world is ful of the sacrifices of heroes and martyrs, but there was only one Victim.
If we were to be victims, we were as firmly secured to our role as Isaac bound to the faggots. No day passed without accentuating it. “Lieutenant, when are we getting off this island?” “Search me. I don’t know.”
“Couldn’t you ask the Colonel?”
“What makes you think he knows?”
“This food is rotten, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, I know—but you’d better eat it.”
“I can’t take another mouthful of this wormy rice.” “Eat it.”
“But how can they expect us to—”
“Eat it.”
“But it gags me.”
“Okay. Don’t.”
“I think I’ve got malaria. Here—feel my forehead.” “Cheez—I think you’re right. It’s hot as hel . You oughta turn in to the sick bay.” “Nah.”
“Why not?”
“What’s the point? They’l only give me some aspirin. If my fever gets real bad, they’l only put me in a tent with the rest of the bad ones. They won’t let me go home. They won’t take me off the island. Nobody leaves. So what’s the point.” “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right. So I’d rather suffer among friends. I’m tel ing yuh—nobody’s leaving this island, not even in a pine box.” “You can say that again. Ain’t we got our own cemetery?” It was so lonely. It was the loneliness of the night watch, listening to the myriad moving things and straining to detect, beneath this irregular rhythm of nature, the regular sound of man. Loneliness. This was the pit that yawned beneath our yearning, our constant reproach of the world at large. In another sense, in an almost mawkish sense, we had gotten hold of the notion that we were orphans. No one cared, we thought. Al of America’s mil ions doing the same things each day: going to movies, getting married, attending col ege commencements, sales meetings, café fires, newspaper drives against vivisection, political oratory, Broadway hits and Broadway flops, horrible revelations in high places and murders in tenements making tabloid headlines, vandalism in cemeteries and celebrities getting religion; al the same, al , al , al , the changeless, daily America—al of this was going on without a single thought for us. This was how we thought. It seems sil y, now. But it was real enough, then, and I think we might have become unwarrantably bitter alongside that evil river, had there not come at last a tearing, liberating change; we were ordered to new positions. We left the river. We left without notice. We swung our packs onto our backs and our guns onto our shoulders, and walked over the wooden bridge where the Tenaru doubles back, past the crocodile lair, and up a hil and down into the fields.

4
It was a respite. The fields were like a mid-week holiday that saves a job from drudgery. It was a recess, a winter vacation. Fear seemed almost to vanish. It was as though we were members of an archaeological mission, or a hunting party. Only the absence of lights at night reminded us of the triune foe: the dark, the jungle and the Jap.
Even the terrible heat in these stifling fields of kunai grass could not distress us, for we had built our machine gun pit twice the size of its predecessors on the Tenaru and could take refuge in its cool confines. Our pit was indeed a fort, perhaps as big as a kitchen, six feet or more down. Overhead were double thicknesses of logs, a few inches of dirt and a heavy sodding of wild grass which took root almost as soon as we had planted it and which, from a hundred feet distant, gave the pit the aspect of a hil ock. With our great field of fire rol ing away from us like the vast un-harvested sea, and with our nasty network of barbed wire like a wicked shoal to ensnare the unwary, we felt that we need reckon with only a direct hit from a bomber or a battleship. We retired behind our defenses to loaf and to nurse our “tropical ulcers.” This is a name which we conferred upon any running or festering sore, and most especial y upon those which ate into the outer covering of the bone. There were few of us whose legs and hands were not dappled with these red- and-white rosettes of pain; red with blood, white with pus and often ringed with the black of feeding flies. Yet, there was luxury in the fields. We had beds. A supply of Japanese rope had been discovered in our area. We made beds with it, driving logs into the ground to shape an oblong, and plaiting a mattress of the rope. What comfort! Dry, warm, and above the ground. No mere voluptuary in his bed of feathers and satin, with his canopy stretching silkily overhead, with his bel -pul next to his hand and his mistress curled at his feet, could have surpassed us for pure pleasure. Chuckler and the Hoosier slept alongside each other, erecting their beds only inches apart, as did al other watch mates, such as Runner and myself. Their beds were about a dozen yards distant in the scrub between the pits and the jungle. It seemed that almost every night, while Runner and I lay whispering to each other, we would hear the thunderous progress of a land crab through the brush. We would hear, too, the snoring of the Hoosier, and we would cease to whisper and wait.
Then there would be silence, like the pause between notes of music. It would be broken, simultaneously, by an indignant shriek from Hoosier, a shout of laughter from the Chuckler and an unbelievable clatter-and-crash that was the land crab scuttling to safety. “Dammit, Chuckler, it ain’t funny.”
“Whatsa matter, Chuckler? What happened?” That would be Runner, his voice strangled with suppressed laughter. “It’s the crab again. Hoosier’s crab. It came through again and cut the rope and pinched Hoosier’s ass.” Hoosier’s reply shocked the night. But laughter rose up to assuage the injury, great shouts of it leaping skyward until even the aggrieved Hoosier could not remain aloof. Now how can a man be frightened with things like this happening around him? Our airplanes had begun to chal enge Japanese supremacy in the air above us. Aerial dogfights raged daily over Henderson Field, and because we were in such proximity to the airstrip, many were above our pits. But we had now such a wel -developed fear of airplanes that we would not come aboveground so long as the bombers lingered or the shrapnel of anti-aircraft bursts kept fal ing. Only Scar-Chin persisted in what had once been a general delight in watching the show. He sat on the roof of the pit, ejaculating like a child at the circus, stirring not a foot even when the thump of the bombs was dangerously close, or when we in the pit below could hear the tinkle of fal ing shrapnel or the whizz of bomb fragments. He supplied us with a running description of the battle. “Oh, boy—there goes one!” We would hear the shriek of a plunging plane. Then a shattering blast. “Oooh. That must have been a five-hundred-pounder. Hey, Chuckler, Lucky—c’mon up. You don’t know what you’re missing.” “The hel we don’t,” Chuckler growled, and then, raising his voice, “Whaddya mean—there goes one? Whose?” “Ours.”
We would exchange raised eyebrows. The Runner, or someone, would shake his head. “The bastard doesn’t care who wins!” “Look at them! Look at them! They’ve got them. They’ve got them on the run. The Japs are running—they’re taking off.” Sometimes, in exasperation, or when the bombs came closer than usual, someone would shout up to him, “C’mon down here, Scar-Chin. C’mon, you crazy bastard, before you get your ass blown off.” Scar-Chin would chortle, “What’s the difference? They can knock it off down there, too. Makes no difference where you are. If you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it, and there isn’t anything you can do about it. When your number comes up, that’s it, brother. So why worry?” There was no arguing with him, nor with his fel ow fatalists. Kismet was al the fashion on Guadalcanal. You could hear them saying, It Is Written, in a hundred different ways: “Why worry, you’l go when your time comes.”—“Poor Bil , it must have been his time to go.”—“Phew! I sure thought that one had my number on it.”
There is almost no argument against fatalism. Argue until you are weary, but men like Scar-Chin stil lounge among the fal ing bombs. Tel them they don’t believe it, when they say, “You go when your time comes.” Suggest that it is they, through their own foolhardiness, who choose the time. Impress upon them that they are their own executioner, that they pul their own name out of the hat. Remind them that even if it is fatalism that they want—as opposed to common sense—they stil must choose it: they must even choose no choice. It is a fine argument, an excel ent way to pass the time while the bombs fal and Scar-Chin—that disturbing fatalist Scar-Chin—lounges above without a word of rebuttal, himself alone among the exploding steel. On a hot day, I withdrew from the mud-floored pit to the thin shade of the scrub, where I threw myself face downward to nap. I awoke with the earth trembling beneath me. I awoke sweating with fear. The earth quivered and I knew it to be an earthquake. I was horrified that the earth might open beneath me and swal ow me up; I was disappointed that it did not, that I saw no great fissures. Perdition must be like this; the earth opening, the final betrayal, the nothingness under the feet and the eternal wailing plunge. My bel y was rumbling so with hunger and gas that the Runner complained he could not sleep at night. He mistook it for the faraway thunder of enemy battleships. One night I awoke to hear him scrambling from his sack and racing for the pit. “Everybody up!” he shouted. “Everybody up! It’s the battleships again!” “Hey, Runner,” I hol ered at him. “Get back here, before you blow your top. That’s no battleship—that’s my bel y.” He came back, cursing me half-heartedly, a sort of sheepish, hopeless imprecation. Of course, Runner had good cause to fear battleships whenever he heard a muffled rumbling. While we were in the fields, the shel ing from the sea rose to a thunderous pitch. The earth would quiver beneath those blows, and they were nearer here than on the river.

The first salvo was as sudden and unexpected as an earthquake. No one ever heard its ghostly pah-boom, pah-boom far out to sea, nor heard the
rushing of projectiles through the air until that triple, tearing crash of the detonating shel s rent sleep as the screech of braking tires rends the serenity of the living room.
Hateful cursing in the dark, feet pelting to the pit, struggling and jostling at the entrance like New Yorkers in the subway. Another night lost, another sleep conceded to the enemy. They were stil whittling us. We had been nearly two and a half months on Guadalcanal the night the worst shel ing came, and I remember it chiefly because it was the night I nearly panicked.
The crash of the first shel s tore so suddenly into a deep sleep that I could not control myself. It seemed they had exploded in my back pocket; the next ones surely would make bits of me.
I clawed frantical y at my mosquito net. I tried to butt my way through it, tried to bul through gossamer. Then the next cluster landed, no nearer than the first; I drew breath and lay stock-stil for a moment, as though to straighten out of the panting pretzel into which panic had twisted me. Deliberately, I reached beneath me to clutch the mosquito net at the bottom of the fold and lift it free. Careful y, I climbed out. Determinedly, I stood erect. Then I kicked myself in the behind and walked to the pit. It was the worst shel ing, but I slept through it. Having regained control of myself, having been spared the stigma of a public funk, I was completely confident and relaxed. I was unafraid, so I slept. Chuckler found papayas on the banks of the Ilu. We ate them in the morning before chow, while the cool of the night and the morning’s moisture was in them. Lieutenant Ivy-League heard of them, asked for some, and seeing we had finished them, organized a papaya party to go in search of these succulent melons.
But there were no more papayas on the banks of the Ilu. Instead we found something better. Our papaya parties became swimming parties. We would station sentries on the farther bank and take our pleasure in that wonderful river. It was the same one in which we had bathed and drunk the day of our landing; stil swift, stil cold, stil a delight to hot and sweating flesh. The tropics has its own anodynes, what the modern world cal s “built-in.” Such are the cool milk of the coconut or the swift-running little rivers that come dancing down from the hil s. Streams like the Ilu and the Lunga kept us in health. I have no statistics to support me, but my own observations were that those of us who bathed frequently in them were those least afflicted by ulcers or malaria. But our rediscovery of the Ilu came too late. We had had only a week of her charms, when we were notified to stand by to move out. We were going to new positions.
“The army’s here.”
“Like Hel !”
“I’m tel ing you, they’re here. I saw them myself.” It was the Chuckler, expostulating angrily with one hand, while the other clutched a white sack slung over his shoulder. “I was down the beach—at Lunga Point. I saw them land.” “What’s in the sack?” asked the Runner.
The Chuckler grinned. He squatted on his haunches in the manner we had when there was nothing to sit on and the ground was muddy, and he began to laugh.
“I never saw anything like it. I was down on the beach right where the Lunga runs into the bay and I saw their ships. Some of them were stil coming ashore in L.C.T.’s, and there was a whole bunch of them in the coconut grove there when suddenly somebody hol ers ‘Condition Red!’ Poor bastards, I felt sorry for them. They’d had a rough time the night before. That big naval shel ing was for them. I heard the Japs got here too late to sink their transports, so they threw the stuff into the airfield, anyway. It didn’t hit the doggies, but it sure scared hel out of them. “Anyway, they was in no condition for an air raid. They started digging and scrambling around. One of their officers gets a bright idea and the next thing you know they’re al taking off for cover in the jungle.” Chuckler’s face crinkled.
“You shoulda seen it. It was the damndest thing. No sooner are the doggies gone, when a whole raggedy horde of Gyrenes comes running out of the jungle. It was like it was staged. The doggies vanish into the jungle on one side, the planes come overhead and start bombing the airport and these raggedy-assed marines come slipping out of the jungle on the other side and start looting everything the doggies left behind. Then Condition Yel ow comes and they melt right back into the jungle. The coconut grove looked like a cyclone hit it. When the doggies came back, half their stuff was gone.” It was a great joke on the dog-faces and the sort of comedy marines enjoy most. “You mean you was just watching this al the time?” asked the Hoosier disbelievingly. “Hel no! I just watched ‘em pour out of the jungle. When I seen what they were doing, I joined in.” “What’d you get?”
The Chuckler opened his bag—also stolen—and disclosed his swag. It was the plunder of a judicious thief. No frippery, no useless ornament or artifices of that artificial world back home, like electric shavers or gold rings or wal ets, nothing but solid swag of the sort that was without price on our island, things like socks or T-shirts or bars of soap or boxes of crackers. That was what the Chuckler stole, and we applauded him as the men of Robin Hood might have sung the praises of Little John upon his return from a light-fingered excursion into Nottingham Town. It was but a few hours before we learned that this very army outfit was going to take our place in the lines. We were glad to hear it. Their arrival on Guadalcanal meant that we were no longer surrounded. Henceforth, contact with the outside world would be common. The fate of Wake Island no longer haunted us. Our navy was back. The worst that could happen to us now was Dunkirk. So we were glad to see the soldiers when they came trudging up to our pits. They came after another air raid; a very close one. But the Thing had not infected them yet. War was stil a lark. Their faces were stil heavy with flesh, their ribs padded, their eyes innocent. They were older than we, an average twenty-five to our average twenty; yet we treated them like children. I remember when two of them, having heard of the Ilu, immediately set off for it, picking their way through the barbed wire, like botanists off on a field trip. I shouted at them to come back. I cannot say exactly why I shouted; perhaps because they seemed not to show the proper respect for danger. The barbed wire seemed to them an obstacle course, the enemy jungle a picnic ground. Their curiosity was childlike, their very backs bespoke trust, and they mocked my own dark memories of this island. “Get the hel back here,” I shouted, and they returned. Their officer said, “What’s wrong?” and I replied, with exaggerated concern, “Some bombs landed out there. They may be delayed action.” He was gratified, and thanked me. “Thank God for somebody who knows these things.” It made me feel like a prig. So we said good-by. We left them in the fields. We let them take possession of our magnificent field of fire and our solid pits and our precious sleeping sacks of rope, our barbed wire and the Ilu, and we climbed onto waiting trucks. We had lived on the sands of the beach, and mud of the river bank, the trampled kunai of the fields, and now we were going to the coral of the ridges. Up, up and up we went, around and around, climbing roads that seemed to coil about our ridge like a spiraling serpent, until we came to the uppermost

level and they told us to get down.
That was how we came to the Ridge.

5
The Ridge rose like the backbone of a whale from the dark and wind-tossed sea of the jungle around us. It rose to command a panoramic view, not only of the bay but of al northern Guadalcanal. Lieutenant Ivy-League was urging us on, half trotting in front of us, as though he were the footbal coach coming onto the field before the lumbering, equipment-laden varsity. He led us down to the extreme southern point of the whale, where the snout curved down into the jungle. We had been given an extra machine gun to operate. He divided our squad into two. “Chuckler, you take one. Lucky, you take the other.” Urgency seemed to pitch his voice higher, and we became concerned. “See,” he said, pointing out over the jungle, “that’s Grassy Knol .” Someone snickered. “Anyway, if we never get to it, we can always say we saw it.” The lieutenant bit his lip and said: “Intel igence says the Japs are massing out there. They’re expected tonight.” Now he had no difficulty with his audience.
“This is where the Raiders and the Paramarines held them. But they may try here again. That’s why you’ve got the extra gun.” He turned to glance down into the jungle. “That’s the trail to Grassy Knol down there.” No one spoke, and he motioned for me and my squad to fol ow. We jumped down the side of our Ridge spur, a sheer six-foot drop. The lieutenant pointed to a sort of low cave dug in the side of the hil . “Put your gun in there,” he said, and left, promising to send warm chow before nightfal . It was a trap. It was a trap, trap, trap.
It was a blind eye, an evil eye, a cyclopean socket glaring out of the side of the clay-red hil down into the choked ravine whence, even now, night drifted toward us.
We looked at each other.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get the gun in there.” We set the gun up wordlessly. But there was no room for more than two men—myself and my assistant. He was Cincinnati, a blond, square, smooth- talking Ohioan who was to distinguish himself in Australia by lending his comrades money at ten percent. The others—Runner, Oakstump, Red the medical corpsman, and Amish the Pennsylvania Dutchman—scattered out on the hil side. I could hear them inching up it, getting farther and farther away from the trap. I said nothing. Who could blame them? I felt like a man with his arms pinioned. It was impossible to fight from our position. They would be upon us before we knew it. The file of little brown men padding up the trail would burst upon us from but a few yards away. Should we repel them, it would be the shock of but a moment; our cave was so poorly concealed, so poorly chosen, a hand grenade would finish us at the first try.
They would hardly need to take aim.
If they came tonight, we would die in our postage-stamp machine gun pit. We could not get away. Worse, we could not stop them; we could not even give them pause. It is one thing to die, another to die uselessly. Night was upon us. We sat in the blackness, the sound-enhancing stil ness, listening to our own breathing like a dying man feeling for his pulse, starting at the sound of the earth crumbling softly around us. Below, the jungle stirred uneasily. We began to curse. Softly, ever softly, we cursed the stupidity of the officer who had laid out the lines, the thoughtlessness of Ivy-League; we cursed things singly or in pairs, general y or in the particular; and when we had done, when we had drawn off the venom of hopelessness, I turned to Cincinnati and said, “Start tearing the gun down. We’re getting the hel out of here. We’l move up on top of the hil . I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning to die without a fight.”
He whispered, “You can say that again,” and began to take the gun apart, while I crawled out of the cave to warn the men on the hil side. I cal ed softly to them, “Runner … Amish …” “That you, Lucky?” It was Amish, surprise and just a tinge of suspicion in his voice. “Yeah, it’s me. Look. We’re coming up, we’re bringing the gun up on top of the hil . It’s a trap down here. Keep us covered while we move and tel Runner to warn Chuckler and the others so they won’t shoot at us.” He whispered, “Okay,” and I crawled back inside the cave. I said to Cincinnati, “You take the gun and the water can and I’l take the tripod and the ammo box.”
He said nothing, and then I whispered, “Let’s go.” We didn’t bother to try to crawl out with our cumbersome gear. We kicked out the sandbags protecting the cave mouth and scrambled out and up and away from that claustrophobic pit. We were sweating when we had done setting up the gun again, but it was with relief. There was elbow room. Now a man might fight. But we had become unstrung. Not ten minutes later, I leaned forward and laid a hand on Cincinnati’s arm, thinking I heard movement below and to the left.
When I thought I heard a sibilant command like “Over here!” I whispered, “Here they come!” and snicked the gun bolt. We waited for the little brown men, for the silhouette of the mushroom helmet against the black bulk of the jungle. But no one came.
No one came al night, though we heard gunfire and the smash of mortars. In the morning we learned that the attack had come against the army, against the very unit that had replaced us that day. They sat in our great big pits, behind our barbed wire and our field of fire, and they massacred the Japs. We felt disappointed; not that they had not come against us on the Ridge, but that we had not been in the fields to mow them down. We were glad they had not hit us on the Ridge, exposed as we were. They would have swept over us, though we might have held them up. We learned that morning, too, that we had been expendable for the evening. “Didn’t you know?” asked one of the other gunners who was stationed farther back on the Ridge. “We were under orders to shoot anything that came up the hil .”
“Yeah? Supposing we came up? Supposing it got too hot and we pul ed back?” The man shrugged. “What d’ya think we would do—ask to see your liberty card? We’d’a shot your ass off, that’s al .” Hoosier’s eyes went big and he swore indignantly. “Wel I’l be go-to-hel !” No one criticized me for moving the gun. Lieutenant Ivy-League agreed to it when I showed him that from the spur we could command the entire trail with plunging fire, as wel as the ravines below it, and that we also might set up a cross fire with the Gentleman’s gun, above and beyond up to the right. Also, should my gun be overrun, the Gentleman could deliver a plunging fire into it. What a fortress we made of that Ridge snout! We stripped the sides of the ravines of their cover. We leveled plateaus and covered them with barbed wire. We sowed the remaining jungle with booby traps fashioned with hand grenades. We fil ed gal on cans with gasoline and fastened these to trees at points where our guns had been sighted in,

so that we could fire incendiary bul ets into them and set them alight. We got one-hundred-and-five mil imeter shel s from the artil ery and buried them in
the jungle, preparing them for detonation by electric wires running down from our pits. We dug rifle holes between the pits, and later, trenches running from hole-to-hole-to-pit, so that the ridges commanded by our guns and the riflemen of G Company were honeycombed with fortifications. Final y, we explored the jungle front for al the flat ground, where the enemy might be most inclined to set up mortars or machine gun fire, or where an attack might most likely be mounted, and these we registered with our guns, sighting in on them, each man careful y measuring his own hand span, so that he could fire at night and hit the target.
Al the while, a terribly bright sun beat down on us. There was not a single tree on the Ridge. We had no shade, except to duck into the pits; and by mid- afternoon even these had become unbearable. Sweat streamed from us and the ulcers yawned on our hands and legs. What bitter desperate anger at the sight of blood from a barbed-wire prick, and the hopeless foreknowledge of the flies that would be upon it. Only constant motion kept the greedy, filthy flies away. High as we were, we were not too high for them. We had out-climbed the mosquitoes, but the flies fed on us unceasingly. Sometimes the pus built up painful pressures, whereupon Red, our corpsman, would draw a pitted, rusty scalpel from his kit and probe the wound. He would look at a particularly wicked sore and whistle, “Phewee! How long have you had this one?” “’Bout a week.”
“That so?” he would inquire mildly, like a man discussing his neighbor’s zinnias, and then drive his knife into the sore with al the verve of the man who likes his work.
Brick, from my squad, suffered terribly from the ulcers. His legs were thick with them. He suffered from the heat, too, as did Red. It was an ordeal for both of them, both having the fairest skin to match their flaming hair and light-blue eyes. But they reacted differently. Brick succumbed. Each day when the sun reached its zenith he retired to the pit and lay with his face against the cool water cans, a wet piece of cloth on his brow. Sometimes he passed out, or became so exhausted he was unable to move. Only assignment to working parties at cooler points on the lines, or a blessed visitation from the rain, saved him from his daily agony. Red became a mole. He kept his helmet forever jammed down over his eyes, and covered his body as though he were in the Arctic. He withdrew within himself.
He ceased to talk to us, except to dispense medical counsel with an aplomb rivaled only by an outrageous ignorance of his subject, or else to carry on a sort of frantic monologue concerning his chances of being assigned to duty near his home town of Utica, should he survive Guadalcanal. But that helmet! He wore it always. He wore it for fear of the heat and for fear of the bombs. He slept with it on. He bathed with it on. It was not uncommon to see him, standing in the middle of the stream near E Company’s lines to our rear, his body ridiculously white—his helmet on! To mention it to him, to shout “Red, take that damned helmet off!” was to draw a look of animal hatred. Under the helmet, his face became smal and sharp and hateful, like an animal with pointed teeth. Soon the helmet became a fixation with us. We wanted it off. It was a sign that Red was going loco—and after him, who? We schemed to rid ourselves of it.
“The only thing we can do, is shoot it ful of holes,” said Chuckler. We were squatting on the hil side, where we always did, midway between the Chuckler’s pit and mine. Red sat apart from us, molelike, his helmet slumped over his inward-looking eyes. Hoosier reflected and grinned slyly. “Who’s gonna do the shooting?”
“Me,” said the Chuckler.
“Oh, no, you’re not. We’l draw straws.” The Chuckler protested, but we outvoted him. It made no difference. He won the draw. The plan was for Runner to engage Red in conversation while I came up behind him and knocked off his helmet. Chuckler was to spray it with machine gun bul ets while it rol ed down the hil . Runner strol ed over and sat down beside Red, wondering out loud if it would be possible—once we were delivered from Guadalcanal—to obtain a soft bil et upstate. Red immediately shifted the venue to Utica, and the question to his heart. I stole up behind him and knocked off his helmet. Chuckler’s gun gave roaring, stuttering voice. The twin shocks of the loss of his helmet and the sound of the gun sent Red to his feet as though from a spring released. He clutched his head, his unkempt flaming mop, as though the top of it had gone off with the helmet. There was terror on his face. Everyone was jumping, waving his arms and whooping.
“Let ‘er go, Zeke!”
“Yip, yip, yip—yahoo!”
“Hey, Red—too bad your sil y head ain’t in that helmet!” “Shoot ‘er, Chuck—shoot the sides out of the blasted thing!” “Yaaaa—hoo!”
Fil ed with holes, the helmet rol ed out of sight beneath the hil . Runner yel ed to the Chuckler to cease fire and dashed down to retrieve it, setting it atop a barbed-wire pole where it was shot into a sieve. Then it was brought up the hil and flung at Red’s feet. He gazed at it in horror. He turned to look at us and there was not even hatred in his eyes, only gathering tears and the dumb pleading look of the animal that has been beaten to the ground. We had half hoped that he would laugh. But he wept and ran up the hil to the Battalion Aid Station. There he stayed, until a new helmet was found for him and he could be persuaded to return to our pits. When he did, his manner was more distant than ever and his chin strap was never again undone. Nor did anyone dare joke with him about the time we shot his helmet into bits. It was November, three months and more since we had landed. The Japanese had been coming at our Division perimeter al of October, it seemed, always attacking over a narrow front, penetrating slightly during the night, and then, in the morning, being driven back with terrific loss. Yet they kept coming. Hardly a battalion of our three infantry regiments—First, Fifth and Seventh—had not fought its battle. So had the doggies of the 164th Regiment. But the Japanese kept coming. We could see them, sometimes, pouring off the beached transports down at Kokumbona. Sometimes the old Airacobras would rise off the field and lumber down to the transports to bomb and strafe them. We cheered and danced as they passed overhead, en route to the carnage. We watched, fascinated, as the Airacobras dived to strafe or to release their bombs in that slow, yawning, dreadful parabola.
But they kept coming. They had heavy artil ery, now; at the Matanikau River they had used heavy tanks. They kept coming at our lines, kept being thrown back; but every night we expected them. Time had become a terrible catchy rhythm, like the breathing of a child frightened by sounds in the dark. Each night we held our breath, the men of the First Marine Division and the soldiers who had joined us—on the ridges, in the ravines, looking seaward from the beach, guarding the rivers, crouching in airport shelters—al held their breath like a single, giant organism, harking for the sounds of the intruder in the dark. Each morning we released it—a long, slow, silent exhalation. … They kept coming.

With them came more and more of their airplanes, winging in from Rabaul silvery and bright, like flying fish, high up in that most blue sky. Sometimes,
before or after the bombers had dropped their loads, dogfights would growl over our Ridge so close that it seemed we had only to put out a hand to touch the combatants.
From such a melee one day, a Zero took to playing with us, strafing us. Chuckler became so angry he dragged his gun out of the pit and set it up to return the fire. He was aware of the difficulty of hitting a streaking Zero by firing a puny thirty-caliber machine gun over open sights, yet he could not bear huddling in the pit while the Jap made sport of us. He swore at the Zero as it banked graceful y, and he struggled to get his gun in position, shouting at me, “C’mon, Luck—give me a hand.” I ran to assist him. But the Zero had turned and was coming back. Before I could reach him, it was upon us with a roar. Seeing the puffs of dust its bul ets kicked up, hearing the musical tinkle of its empty shel s fal ing on the Ridge, I turned and ran. Chuckler had sprawled flat. I ran. It was behind me, roaring, spitting, tinkling. I jumped off the hil side above the cave which I had abandoned the first night. I heard it roar over me before I hit the ground six feet below.
Atop the hil Chuckler was cursing wildly. I scrambled back up, helped him to get the gun erect and loaded, and squatted beside him to feed it. We waited for the Zero’s return.
It banked and made for us.
“C’mon, you son of a bitch,” Chuckler growled. “You won’t find it so easy this time.” The tinkling had begun again; the dust puffs were dancing toward us; our gun was hammering—when, from behind the Ridge, appeared two Airacobras flying wingtip-to-wingtip, and the Zero disappeared. I say it disappeared. I suppose it blew up, disintegrated under the impact of the cannon which the Airacobras mounted in their nose. But I heard no explosion, perhaps because by then our Ridge had become a perfect cauldron of sound, what with the dogfighting, the bombing of the airport and the answering wham of the airport anti-aircraft guns. It was the AAA guns that gave us as much pause as did the enemy. Most of their flak bursts were directly overhead, and often our ridge would sound like a xylophone registering the fal ing shrapnel. We took cover, as much from fear of this brimstone rain as from enemy bombs or bul ets. It was not pleasant to be walking the Ridge, far removed from cover, and to see the beautiful enemy host approaching and the black shel clusters popping into sight around them—and then to hear the rattling of the shrapnel.
On a clear day in mid-November I passed through the Battalion Command Post, just as Condition Red was shouted, just as the bombers, flying very high in a tight V, appeared in the sky. Our antiaircraft threw up a black cloud of explosive, forcing them to veer off and to jettison their bombs, which crashed harmlessly in the jungle.
Soon I was alone. Everyone had gone below ground. I ran from hole to hole, seeking admittance. But al were ful . At last I came to the officers’ shelter dug in the hil side. With the fragments fal ing around me in a chil ing fugue, I swept back the burlap over the entrance and gazed into the unblinking formidable glass eye of Captain High-Hips. What disdain! It was as though the holder of a coach ticket had sought to enter a parlor car! His hostility was as curt as a slap in the face. In that moment I hated High-Hips and al his class. I muttered an apology and let the burlap fal back in place. I retired to the solitude of the Ridge and the rain of shrapnel, vowing: Let me rather die out here than be tolerated down there. But I was not scratched; only my sensitivity suffered. Souvenirs reappeared while we were on the Ridge. I had not seen him since the Tenaru. He was now one of a half dozen sharpshooters serving as regimental scouts. At intervals of a week or so he could descend into the jungle on an expedition to Grassy Knol . With him was an old-time Marine sergeant, a blocky taciturn ancient with wild bushy red hair and an enormous red beard that gave him the appearance of hel ’s Santa Claus. He never spoke while they moved down our hil with braked step. But Souvenirs loved the banter which his presence provoked. “Hey, Souvenirs, got your pliers?” Souvenirs grinned, tapping his rear pocket. “You know me, boys. I’d sooner forget my rifle.” “How about it, Souvenirs? I’l give you ten bucks for that Bul Durham sack around your neck.” “Yeah, I know what you mean. How about a pint of my blood, too, huh?” “How many teeth you got in that sack?”
“That’s my business.”
“A hundred?”
“Guess again, boy. Guess up a storm.”
Grinning crookedly beneath his handlebar mustache, Souvenirs disappeared into the jungle. But his famous Bul Durham sack ful of Japanese gold teeth had left his admirers engaged in excited speculation. “I wonder how many gold teeth the sucker real y has in his sack?” “I dunno—but a fel ow from his old squad in F Company says he got fifty of ‘em from Hel ’s Point alone. That was three months ago, and he’s been going out on those patrols pretty steady since then. He’s got at least seventy-five of them gold teeth in that sack.” “Must be a couple-thousand-dol ars’ worth. Hel ’s fire! I’d like to have that when we get back to the States. I’d get me a hotel room and a—” “What the hel makes you think you’re gonna see the States again?” “Where d’ya think we’re going when we get off of here?” “Another island, that’s where! Anybody thinks he’s gonna see the States again is as crazy as hel ! They’l have your ass on another landing so fast you won’t know whether to sweat or draw smal stores. Ain’t nobody around here gonna see the States, not for a long time, anyway, unless he gets carried back.”
“Aw, blow it!”
We were growing irritable. Our strength was being steadily sapped, and a sort of physical depression afflicted many of us. Often a man expended his whole strength going to chow, working his way down the slippery hil to the gal ey tent set in a ravine, and then climbing back up it. Sometimes, if the rain had been especial y heavy, a man might skip chow; just forget about it, even though his bel y might be growling. The hil would be too slippery. The rain. The rainy season was upon us. On our exposed Ridge it fel upon us in torrents. A man was drenched in seconds, his teeth chattering and his hands darting swiftly to his precious cigarettes, transferring them to the safety of his helmet liner, cursing bitterly if he had waited too long before becoming conscious of their peril.
After cigarettes, we were concerned about our ammunition. On the downward slope of the hil , the rain water ran into our pits and holes as though they were sewer receivers. We had to dash for the pits and lift the boxes of machine gun belts out of the water’s way, piling them atop one another on the earthen gun platform. Any dry place in the pit was reserved for ammunition. He who sought refuge from the rain had to sit on the water cans. There were whole days of downpour when I lay drenched and shivering, gazing blankly out of my hole, watching as the sheeted gray rain whipped and undulated over the Ridge. At such times, a man’s brain seems to cease to function. It seems to retreat into a depth, much as the red corpuscles retreat from the surface of the body in times of excitement. One ceases to be rational; one becomes only sentient, like a barnacle clinging to a ship. One is aware only of life, of wetness, of the cold gray rain. But without this automatic retreat of reasons a man can go only one way: he can only go mad.

Barnacle-like, I had made a discovery during the downpour. I had found that even in wetness there is warmth.
I was the only one on the Ridge with a cot. I placed it in my hole. Over this, I had stretched a poncho on which I had sprinkled dirt. We were not permitted so much as a stick above the ground for fear the enemy might find a target. I ditched my hole, and there were times when my homemade drainage and my poncho combined to keep me dry; but when it rained heavily or persistently, I was done. The hole fil ed with water which rose right through my cot and soaked me. At times, I might be lying in an inch or so of water with a foot of water beneath my cot. It was cold. It went right to the bone, because the intense heat had made our blood so thin. At last in disgust I hauled my cot out on the hil side. The hel with it! Let the Jap shoot, if that near-sighted creature could see through the rain, if he was so stupid as to want to.
I placed one dripping blanket under me and pul ed the other over me. It was warm! It was sodden, but it was snug; it was wet, but it was warm; it was miserable, but it made me laugh.
See me now, if you wil , and you wil see the war in the Pacific. Look at the Ridge rearing like a whale from the wild and dark green jungle sea, sweep that tan hil side with your eye and search for a sign of life. You wil see none. You wil see only the gray rain fal ing, the rain and a cot and a solitary man huddling beneath a blanket.
Ah, but he’s happy! He, and only he in al the world, knows of the warmth within a wet blanket! Runner came down with malaria. They kept him at the Battalion Aid Station for a few days, then sent him back to the lines. He was stil feverish, but there was nothing they could do for him. He lay in his hole, unable to eat. When the chil s came, we piled our blankets on top of him. When the fever broke and the sweat began pouring off him, he lay back and grinned. He could barely talk, but he whispered, “It feels so good. It feels so good. So nice and cool.” In mid-November we knew that the crisis had come. Our division had thrown back the Japs time after time, even gone on occasional offensive; we had hung on against stiff odds, until the battle seemed to be even. But crisis was unmistakable in mid-November. It was in the air, a part of the atmosphere; just as a man might sense a hostile presence in the dark, we felt the thing coming against us: the great Japanese task force moving down from the north. If it succeeded we would al go down.
But crisis never comes without being preceded by false optimism. So, too, was our crisis heralded by the appearance in the bay of a flotil a which sailed so gaily in, it seemed certainly to be the long-awaited reinforcements. “Keeripes!” Scar-Chin shouted, even his aplomb shattered. “The navy’s come! The navy’s back! Look in the Channel. Look, look! A cruiser and three destroyers!”
We pelted up the hil side to the Ridge crest, whence unfolded the vast panorama of northern Guadalcanal, the sea and the surrounding islands. From this distance the Channel seemed but a blue lagoon. But there were the warships. We hugged each other and danced—Chuckler, Runner, Hoosier, Oakstump—al of us. We strained our eyes for a glimpse of the transports. They were not in sight yet. Then came the question.
“Who says they’re ours?”
Silence.
The ships’ guns gave answer. They were firing on our island! Here in broad daylight, arrogant, armed with a contempt more formidable even than their guns, they hurled salvo after salvo into the airport, sank the few smal craft we had in sight, executed a sweeping about-face in the Channel and departed the way they had come. Their stems dug into the boiling water as derisively as a woman flouncing her skirts. Chagrin.
Not even our malodorous vocabulary could command a word base enough to express our vexation, our bitter exasperation, our cursing, foaming disappointment.
Back we went down the hil and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make light of it, desperately trying to release the pressure being generated by this new dread which no one dared to name. No one seemed to want to go to bed that night; even though it was dark, al stayed hunched around Chuckler’s pit groping for the cheerfulness of the bright nights when we would stage impromptu vaudevil e, trying to force a gaiety that was not there. At last al crept to their holes. The naval battle awoke us. The voice of the imperturbable Scar-Chin came roaring out of the black, “Kee-ripes! It’s a naval battle! You can see it! C’mon, ya jerks, c’mon up here.” I think of Judgment Day. I think of Götterdämmerung; I think of the stars exploding, of the planets going off like fireworks; I think of a volcano; I think of a roaring and an energy unbelievable; I think, of holocaust; and again I think of night reeling from a thousand scarlet slashes and I see the red eye of hel winking in her wounds—I think of al these, and I cannot tel you what I have seen, the terrible spectacle I witnessed from that hil side. The star shel s rose, terrible and red. Giant tracers flashed across the night in orange arches. Sometimes we would duck, thinking they were coming at us, though they were miles away.
The sea seemed a sheet of polished obsidian on which the warships seemed to have been dropped and been immobilized, centered amid concentric circles like shock waves that form around a stone dropped in mud. Our island trembled to the sound of their mighty voices. A pinpoint of light appears in the middle of the blackness; it grows and grows until it il uminates the entire world and we are bathed in pale and yel ow light, and there comes a terrible, terrible rocking roar and there is a momentary clutching fear to feel Guadalcanal shift beneath us, to feel our Ridge quiver as though the great whale had been harpooned, as though the iron had smacked into the wet flesh. Some great ship had exploded.
We could not even guess what or whose. We had only to lie on our hil side, breathless, watching until the battle was done, and then to retire to the pits to await dawn with murmuring voices and beating hearts. Were the result not so vital, we would have seemed like basebal fans anxious for the World Series scores.
It was the beating of many motors on the airport that told us we had won. From the moment of dawn the airplanes rose from the airport in pursuit of the enemy fleet. The sound of their motors was as triumphant as the March from Aïda, and we cheered and jigged and waved our arms at them passing overhead, urging them on, shouting encouragement, beseeching them for direct hits, to blast the Nipponese armada from the surface of the sea. It was electrifying. The noise of the airplanes was never absent from the air above our heads. They came and went al day, even the most decrepit among them; and we never tired of saluting them. Al Guadalcanal was alive with hope and vibrant with the scent of victory. We were as doomed men from whose ankles the iron bands have been struck. A great weight was lifted from our shoulders. The enemy was running! The siege was broken! And al through the day, like a mighty Te Deum rising to Heaven, came the beat of the airplane motors. Oh, how sweet the air I breathed that day! How fresh and clean and sprightly the life that leapt in my veins! To be delivered is to be born anew. It was as though we were putting aside our old selves, leaving those melancholy beings behind like a pile of soiled and crumpled clothing, exchanging them for newer persons, for the garb of gaiety and hope.

So the tide turned on Guadalcanal.
Chuckler found a scorpion in his clothes box, a canned-soup crate which he kept in his hole. “Hey, Luck!” he shouted, “I got a scorpion in my box! C’mere.” I gazed at the crabbed creature with its fearsome tail. “Let’s see if they real y commit suicide.” Chuckler found a stone. He struck the bottom of the box sharply with it, driving the scorpion into a corner. His last blow struck perhaps a quarter inch from the cowering scorpion’s body. We waited. We watched in fascination as the tail quivered, came slowly aloft, arched over and plunged into the scorpion’s back. It seemed to be convulsed, then to lie stil : dead. “I’m a son of a bitch!” Chuckler ejaculated, releasing his pent-up breath. “How d’ya like that!” He was for overturning the box and emptying out the dead scorpion, but I suggested we wait a few minutes to be sure. We withdrew to squat on the hil side. In five minutes we returned. The scorpion was gone. “I’m a son of a bitch!” Chuckler said again, this time in exasperation. “You can’t trust nobody. Even the scorpion’s a phony!”

6
Chuckler and I began to forage for the platoon. Lieutenant Ivy-League set us free, like bird dogs, and each day we buckled our pistols over the sun- bleached trousers which we had cut off above the knee, slipped empty packs over our shoulders, secured our helmets and departed from the Ridge. We had to make the descent on foot, but once we had gained the fields and the coastal coconut groves, we were able to hitchhike. Our destination was the food dump set up not far from our first defensive positions on the beach. Food had begun to enter Guadalcanal in abundance after the defeat of the Japanese naval force. But in the manner of distribution characteristic of every army since Agamemnon’s, it had not even begun to reach the frontline troops. It was being funneled into the gal eys and the bel ies of the headquarters units and al the other rear echelons quartered safely behind the lines, those effetes who are at once the envy and the contempt of every frontline trooper who ever had recourse to sanitary stick and slit trench. We considered al this food ours. We considered it ours whether it resided within the barbed-wire enclosure of the food dump or in the store tents of the rear echelons. We would get it by stealth, by guile, or by force: we would steal it, we would beg for it, we would lie for it. At first, when Chuckler and I would drop off the tailgate of the truck on which we had hitched a ride, we would approach the heavily guarded food dump by crawling on our bel ies. Once close to the fence—out of sight by the army guards who sat atop the piles of cases, rifles over their knees—we would scoop out the dirt under the fence and squirm under. Stacks of crates and cartons gave us cover while we crept quietly along, searching for canned fruit, baked beans, spaghetti, Vienna sausage—even, prize of al prizes, Spam! Yes, Spam! Perhaps the processed pork that everyone cal ed Spam was the bane of the Stateside mess hal s, but on Guadalcanal, Spam was a distinct delicacy. Often we would risk a bul et in the back for Spam, softly looting a case of it at the foot of the very stack upon which the sentry sat, like mice filching cheese from between the paws of a sleeping cat. Soon we had no need of stealth. The food dump had become the most popular place on the island. The roads became clogged with plunderers like ourselves, pistols swinging at their hips or rifles slung over shoulders, converging outside the fence like a holiday crowd outside of Yankee Stadium. There were now so many holes dug beneath the fence that one might gain entry at any point. Inside, bearded, gaunt, raggedy-assed marines roved boldly over the premises, attacking the cases with gusto, tearing them open to seize what they wanted, leaving the rejected articles exposed to wind and sun with the indifference of pack rats. When a man’s bag was ful , he sauntered off—contemptuous of chal enge from the guards. Inevitably, such a swarm of thieves depleted the dump and thus brought on more stringent security. We shifted to the ships. Friendly vessels riding at anchor had become a common sight in our channel since the naval battle. We hoped to exchange that marine commodity—taletel ing—for cups of delicious navy coffee, and perhaps even for candy bars! We would wait until a boat had been emptied, before approaching its coxswain. “Hey, sailor, how about a ride out to your ship?” No insolence, here. We played the childlike warrior begging a simple pleasure, the poor little match girl outside the candy shop on Christmas Eve. We played on the sailors’ sympathy, inducing them to overlook the very plain law forbidding marines to visit the ships. We cared for no law ourselves (what could the punishment be?) but the sailors had to be persuaded, as did the Officers of the Deck once the landing craft swung under the ship’s beam and we cal ed up our request to come aboard. Often he shouted down in anger. “No! Coxswain, take those marines back to the beach. You know it’s against regulations to bring troops aboard. Shove off, y’hear me?” “But, sir, I just wanted to come aboard to see a friend of mine. From my home town. Wouldn’t it be okay if my buddy and me came aboard to see my friend? We lived next door to each other. He’s my best friend and I haven’t seen him since the war started. He was with my grandmother when she died.” Al depended now on the officer’s acumen, or his wil ingness to be taken in. Should he ask for the friend’s name, al was lost. Should he be stupid and believe us, or should he fal into the spirit of the thing and grin at our obvious fabrication, we would grasp the rope ladder and climb aboard. Once gaining the run of the ship, we would trade our tales for coffee, our souvenirs for food and candy. A coterie forms quickly about us in the gal ey. We are the cynosure.
“Y’mean them Japs real y was hopped up when they charged you?” a sailor asks, refil ing outstretched coffee mugs. “Sure,” comes the answer. “We found dope on them. They al had needles and packages of dope. They’d hop themselves up before the charge and then they’d come at you banzai-ing.” (No drugs were found on the Japanese.) “Did the marines real y cut off their ears?” “Oh, hel , yes! I knew one fel ow had a col ection of them. Got most of them at the Battle of Hel ’s Point—the Tenaru, y’know. He hung them out on a line to dry out, the dope, and the rain rotted them al away. It rained like hel one night and ruined the whole bunch.” “You wouldn’t believe it, but half of them Japs can speak English. We was hol ering into the jungle one night things like ‘Tojo eat garbage’ and ‘Hirohito’s a son-of-a-bitch’—when al of a sudden this Jap voice comes floating up to us, an’ whaddya think the bastard said?—‘T’hel with Babe Ruth!’” We bask in their laughter and extend our cups for more coffee. A particularly receptive ship might even unlock the ship’s store in our honor, and we would return to the Ridge, packs fil ed with candy bars, razor blades, bars of soap, toothbrushes and sundry trophies of the hunt. Let it be admitted that we were not unselfish in division of the candy bars; for these we considered rightful tribute of the forager. We kept them to ourselves. One day, hearing that the Eighth Marine Regiment—the “Hol ywood Marines”—had reached our shores, and that they had brought with them a PX, Chuckler and I girded for our greatest foray. There were two tents and there were two sentries—each standing with rifle and fixed bayonet in front of a tent. Behind was thickest jungle. Oh, unguarded rear! Oh, defenseless rump! Did they think the jungle impenetrable! Did they count themselves safe, with this paper posterior of theirs? Astonished, Chuckler and I withdrew to the nearby battery of Long Toms to take counsel. We looked at each other and exploded in delighted anticipation of the discomfiture of the Eighth Marines. We made our plan: I was to enter the jungle to cut my way up to the rear of the bigger tent. I would have both of our packs. After fifteen minutes, Chuckler was to strol back to the PX clearing to engage the guards in conversation. The moment I heard voices, I was to cut my way into the tent, fil the packs and carry them back into the jungle.
The cool murk of the jungle was to my liking, as I began to creep toward the tent. My stiletto was very sharp and I had no difficulty sawing through the lianas and creepers blocking my path. It was the necessity for extreme caution that made my progress slow. I had to be careful not to disturb the birds or the crawling things, for fear they might betray me. I was sweating when I reached the rear of the tent; the handle of my knife was slippery. I heard voices and realized that I had been longer than had been anticipated. A thril shot through me at the touch of the hot coarse canvas. My stiletto slid through the drum-tight façade with an almost sensual glide, and in a moment I had cut an opening. It was close within the tent and the odor of creosote fil ed my nostrils. I had to widen the opening to let in light and air. Cartons were stacked one upon another. I peered at the letters on their sides; they were mostly cigarettes; it was a joke, there were plenty of cigarettes on Guadalcanal. But there were other boxes and soon my sweat-soaked eyes fel upon a carton of fil ed cookies. Without another glance at the remaining cases, spurred by the rising and fal ing voices of Chuckler and the sentry, I bent to the task of transferring the contents of one carton into the packs. Even as I worked I had to quel the greed rising within me: “Go on,” it said, “take more. Carry it out into the jungle by the boxful.” I hesitated, but then I

decided to fit my larceny to my needs and resumed my work.
When I had fil ed one pack, I rose to draw a cautious breath and to listen for the voices. Chuckler’s deep laugh came floating through the canvas wal s. I bent to the other pack, reassured. My eye fel upon a partial y opened carton. It contained boxes of cigars!
If cookies were worth their weight in gold on Guadalcanal, then cigars were worth theirs in platinum. In value, cigars could be surpassed only by whiskey, and there was no whiskey on Guadalcanal. Neither had there been cigars, until now. I had stumbled on what was probably the only store of them on the island!
I was for emptying my pack of the cookies, until I saw that there were but five boxes of cigars, which would just fit into the other pack. Quickly, I stuffed them in, and then, arranging one pack on my back and holding the other before me, I slipped from the heat and smel and tension of the tent into the cool and murk and relief of the jungle.
Covering the packs with branches, I rejoined Chuckler. He grinned with delight when he saw me approaching. “Hey, what the hel you doing down here,” he shouted. “I’l bet you’re up to no good.” He nudged the sentry. “Better watch him. He’s one of them dead- end kids from Jersey. He’l steal you blind.” He grinned at me again and I could see the rash devil dancing in his eyes. But the guard thought it not hilarious and a certain nervous tightening of both mouth and rifle hand gave warning. That Chuckler! It was not enough that we should put our heads in the lion’s mouth, but we must tickle his throat as wel ! My answering chuckle was a hol ow thing, and after a few moments I had him by the arm and was leading him away. “You crazy bastard,” I whispered, when we had got a safe distance from the sentry. “You want to tip him off?” I shrugged hopelessly and we departed, to return softly about two hours later to retrieve our loot. We came back to bask in the adulation of the Ridge. We shared the cookies with our buddies and kept the cigars for ourselves. For days afterward, our pits were visited by a stream of officers—and once even a major from the Marine air units—al seeking cigars; al smiling, now, at the jol y enlisted men; al ful of fake camaraderie and falser promises. We gave them none.
We knew that we were winning. We knew it from the moment the P-38’s—the Lightning fighters—appeared in our skies. They came in one day as we crouched in the ravine at chow. Pistol Pete had crashed his desultory shel s not far from us, only a few minutes before. Al of us braced for flight when we heard the roar of their motors and, looking up, saw the gladsome sight of their twin tails streaking over the jungle roof. We cheered wildly, and when Pistol Pete’s shel s came screaming in again, we cursed him good-humoredly out of hope renewed. Going back to the Ridge—where the others waited to be relieved for their turn at chow—it was necessary to pass the stream which served as our washtub. Two men—Souvenirs and his scouting partner, the red-beard who looked like hel ’s Santa Claus—were washing there. They shouted at each other as they scrubbed their bodies. We stopped to listen, and Chuckler asked, “What the hel ’s going on?” Red Beard replied, “This simple tool thinks we’ve had it tougher here than the marines on Wake Island.” He glanced contemptuously at Souvenirs and then appealed to us—“How stupid can you get?” “Whaddya mean stupid?” yel ed Souvenirs. “Trouble with you old salts you figure nobody’s any good who came into the Corps after Pearl Harbor. How do you know about Wake, anyway? You weren’t there—and I stil say it was a picnic compared to this place.” Red Beard was aghast. Even as he turned to let Souvenirs soap his back, he shrieked at him in fury. “Picnic! Don’t talk like a man with a paper ass!” “Aw, blow it … I’l bet the newspapers say this place was twice as bad as Wake. How many times they get bombed there?” “Who cares? How many of them are left?”
“They didn’t al get kil ed. Most of ‘em was taken prisoner. Did we ever surrender? Huh? How about that?” Red Beard turned again, automatical y reclaiming his soap from Souvenirs, hardly pausing to launch his counterattack. “Don’t give me ’at bul about quitting. That’s al I ever hear you boots whining about. At Wake they said, ‘Send us more Japs.’ But you guys say, ‘When do we go home?’” His lip curled over his beard, and he raised his voice mockingly, “When does Mama’s boy go home to show the girls his pwitty boo uniform?”
So the battle raged, so it ended, as it always does, unresolved. The Marine Corps is a fermenter; it is divided into two distinct camps—the Old Salts and the Boots—who are forever warring: the Old Salt defending his past and his traditions against the furious assault of the Boot who is striving to exalt the Present at the expense of the Past, seeking to deflate the aplomb of the Old Salt by col apsing this puffed-up Past upon which it reposes. But the Boot wil forever feel inferior to the Old Salt; he must always attack, for he has not the confidence of defense. The moment he ceases to slash at Tradition with the bright saber of present deeds, the instant he restrains that impetuous sword hand, trusting instead to the calm eye of appraisal—upon that change he passes over to the ranks of the Old Salts and ceases to be a Boot forever. Youth rebels and age conserves; between them, they advance. The Marines wil cease to win battles the moment either camp achieves clear-cut ascendancy. Awareness of this began to dawn upon me as we trudged back up the hil . I was grateful to Red Beard for having reminded us of the men at Wake, and I was confident that he, upon reflection, would lose some of his contempt for us. We were back at the pits when Hoosier broke the silence: “You think Souvenirs was right—what he said about the papers? About Guadalcanal being famous?”
“Hel no!” Chuckler laughed. “I’l bet we ain’t even made the papers.” “Ah dunno, Chuckler,” the Hoosier said thoughtful y. “Ah kinda think he was right, m’self.” He turned to me. “Hey, Lucky—you think mebbe they’d give us a parade in New York?”
The answer came quickly from Chuckler, his eyes glittering at the thought of it. “Saay! Wouldn’t that be something? That’s not a bad idea, Hoosier. Think of al them babes lining the street.” He paused, and the familiar expression of good-natured disdain returned. “Aw, forget it! You know they ain’t gonna give us no parade. They don’t even know we’re alive. Who the hel ever heard of Guadalcanal, anyway!” “Ah’l bet they have,” Hoosier returned, his calm bordering on the smug. “Ah’l bet you we’re famous back home.” “Wel , I’l bet you ain’t getting to parade in New York,” Chuckler came back. “If we’re that famous, if we’re that good—they’l be using us for the next one. We’l get to parade al right—right up Main Street, Rabaul!” “You can say that again!” came the Runner’s gloomy second. He had been silent, biting a thumbnail to shreds. In an instant he had brightened at the thought of the parade and turned to me, speaking in a voice muffled by his munching, “Supposing they do give us a parade, where’d it be, Lucky—up Fifth Avenue?”
“No. You’re thinking of St. Patrick’s Day. That’s where the Irish parade. Probably it’d be up Broadway—from the Battery.” “Battery!” the Hoosier exploded. “What they gonna do, charge us up?” Chuckler nodded. “Everybody. Everybody’s gonna get charged up on good old New York firewater. Right, Lucky?” “Right. Thirty-day leave for al hands.” “And two babes for every man—one white and one dark.” Hoosier broke in sulkily, “Ah ain’t gonna parade. The hel with ‘em. Ah ain’t paradin’ for nobody. Soon as we get off the ship Ah’m gonna break ranks and lose m’self in the crowd.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” said the Runner excitedly. “Supposing we came off the ship and everybody broke ranks and melted into the crowd. They couldn’t find you in a New York crowd. We’d al be gobbled up. Everybody’d be drunk, and they couldn’t do anything to you. Everybody’d be drunk, even the officers.”
Everyone fel dreamily silent, a quiet that was final y broken by the wistful voice of Hoosier. “Ah bet they do, Chuckler—Ah bet they give us a parade.” Two changes had been wrought: the skies of Guadalcanal had become American, and mail was coming through steadily. Both events improved our humor; so it was that a great ripple of mirth ran over the Ridge upon the arrival of a letter from my father. I read the letter squatting on the hil side, my buttocks just above the wet ground. A torrential rain had fal en, fil ing the holes and pits in what seemed but a moment, subsiding suddenly and succeeded by an astonishing swarm of antlike insects so thick that one had to close one’s eyes and shield one’s mouth from them. Their tiny carcasses covered the ground when they fel (it seemed that they lived but a minute after that rain) and so it was that I was careful not to soil my freshly washed pants in either mud or the myriad of dead insects. “Robert (my father wrote), your blue uniform is ready. Shal I send it to you?” Ah …
There came to mind, swiftly and sharply, a set of marine dress blues. I saw that gorgeous raiment. I squatted, stuck up on our Ridge like Stylites on his pole, surrounded by wilderness and wetness and the minute corpses of mil ions of ephemeral ants. I squatted, clothed only in trousers cut off at the knee and a pair of moccasins stolen from an army duffle bag and I contemplated this vision of glory. “Robert, your blue uniform is ready. Shall I send it to you?”
In an instant it had caught the fancy of the Ridge. Until we left the Ridge, I was “Lucky, the guy whose old man wants to send him a set of blues.” I would walk to chow, and the men from the other pits would greet me with “Hi’ya, Lucky—where’s yer blues?” or “Hey, Lucky, yer old man send you the blues yet?” My very approach was enough for smiles, as though each of them was envisioning the First Marine Division drawn up on our Ridge, resplendent in dress blues with flags flying and bands playing, marching off into the jungle to do battle. There was no boisterousness, no guffaws; merely the smiles and the sal ies and occasional rib-poking, as though the very quaintness of my father’s proposal were a thing to be cherished, like a family joke, a bit of whimsy to save one’s sanity on this mad island of ours. Everyone thought my father a hel of a guy, and they often inquired after his health. Sergeant Dandy gave us the bad news. He had visited us the day before to take our measurements for new clothing, and the inference had been so encouraging that we had spent the night in happy speculation. We were sure it meant we were leaving Guadalcanal; the question was, for where? But Sergeant Dandy’s nasal cracker whine shredded our happiness like a whip. “Stand by to move out in the mawnin’. Weah movin’ out from the Matanikau in a new offensive. Get al youah foul-weather gear ready and be sure youah guns is oiled and youah ammunition belt’s dry. Eighth Marines’l be up to relieve us in the mawnin’.” He stopped and we examined each other in silence. There was no pleasure on his straight-featured boy-man’s face, not even a hint of malicious satisfaction at being the bearer of bad tidings. The heart of Sergeant Dandy was as heavy as anyone’s. “Doan ask me whut it’s al about. Doan ask me no sil y questions. Jus’ do what I tol’ you.” He turned and left. After nearly five months, this.
Runner had malaria, Brick barely stirred from the pit except at night, Hoosier and Oakstump were subject to long periods of depression, Red had long since left us, I had dysentery, Chuckler was irritable—al of us were emaciated and weakened beyond measure. But we were to move out on the attack. We could not move to chow without gasping for breath, but we were to move on the enemy. We despaired.
In the morning, we crouched by our guns and waited for the order to dismantle them and move out. It did not come. Nor did it come the next day or the next, and Hope came creeping back, blushing, ashamed of her disloyal flight but commending herself to us once more with the promise never again to desert the ramparts. Then one morning the word came to move out. Sergeant Dandy gave it to us.
“Leave the guns behind,” he said. “Take only your rifles and foul-weather gear.” He grinned.
“We’re being relieved!”
It was December 14, 1942. We had been on the lines without relief since August 7. My battalion—the Second Battalion, First Regiment—was the last of those in the First Marine Division to come out of the lines. Guadalcanal was over.
We had won.
We came clanking down from the Ridge in a chil drizzle, while the men of the Eighth Marine Regiment came clambering up. They wore kel y helmets, the kind which our fathers wore in the First World War and which the British stil wear. They looked miserable, plodding up the slippery Ridge in the drizzle. We pitied them, even though al the worst was past. But we could not resist needling them, these men from San Diego in sunny California. “Here come the Hol ywood Marines.”
“Yeah, wil you look who’s here. If it ain’t the Pogybait Marines! Where’s your PX, boys?”
“Aw, blow it …”
“Tch tch—wil you listen to them talk! That ain’t the way they do it in the movies. Shame on you!” “Hey—what’s the latest from Hol ywood? How’s Lana?” “Yeah—that’s it—how’s Lana? How’s Lana Turner?” They tried to appear disgusted but they could not conceal the awe with which the reliever must inevitably regard the relieved. We went down the Ridge, haggard but happy; they came up it, ful -fleshed but with forebodings. I have said we were happy; we were; we were delirious. The next week we spent beneath an improvised tent on a hil side where the ridges meander down to the kunai fields, Chuckler and I visiting and revisiting the food dumps until we had col ected so much food that I could afford to devour a gal on can of preserved apricots, making myself wonderful y, wonderful y sick to my stomach. I lay on my bel y and felt the stretching pain and marveled: “I’m sick. I ate too much. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world—I ate too much!”

Only desultory visits from Washing Machine Charlie served to remind us that the Japanese were stil contesting Guadalcanal.
The fol owing week was spent in a Garden of Eden. We marched to the mouth of the Lunga River to a tent encampment in a grove of coconuts. They gave us a ration of beer. Somehow we managed to gather enough of it to get mildly drunk every night. During the day, we swam in the Lunga, that marvelous river whose cold swift waters kept the malarial fire out of my blood. Swimming was often hazardous, due to the wags who delighted in throwing hand grenades into the water. Once I heard a mighty shout out on the seashore, and running over, was astonished to see the giant sting ray which some men had trapped in a native fishing net. Of course it was dead, punctured in a thousand pieces by having offered a thousand trigger-happy men the opportunity to “get their gun off.”
Then we were sleeping alongside a road, waiting to embark the next day. On that day, they brought us our Christmas packages from home. We could not take them aboard ship with us, for we were not al owed to carry more than our packs and weapons. Chuckler and I had already asked Lieutenant Ivy- League to carry our remaining boxes of cigars in his sea bag; officers would be permitted to carry sea bags. It puzzled us to see the reappearance of sea bags—strictly the issue of enlisted men—and it angered us to see them handed out to officers. This was the first piece of discrimination which we encountered, the first flip of the Single-Sided Coin, whereby the officers would satisfy their covetousness by forbidding us things rightful y ours, and then take them up themselves, much as politicians use the courts to gain their ends. So we devoured what we could of these Christmas gifts from home, and threw the rest away. “Stand by to move out. Forrr-ward, harch!” We ambled down to the beach, our gait, our bearded, tattered aspect unable to match the precision of that command. We clambered into the waiting boats. We stood at the gunwales and watched the receding shoreline. Our boat putt-putted to a wal owing halt beneath a huge ship that listed so markedly to port that it seemed drunk. It was one of the old Dol ar Line ships; the President Wilson, I believe.
“Climb up them cargo nets!”
As we had come, so did we leave.
We were so weak that many of us could not make the climb. Some fel into the water—pack, rifle and al —and had to be fished out. Others clung desperately to the nets, panting, fearful to move lest the last ounce of strength depart them, too, and the sea receive them. These also had to be rescued by nimble sailors swarming down the nets. I was able to reach the top of the net, but could go no farther. I could not muster the strength to swing over the gunwale, and I hung there, breathing heavily, the ship’s hot side swaying away from me in the swel s, very perdition lapping beneath me—until two sailors grabbed me under the armpits, and pul ed me over. I fel with a clatter among the others who had been so brought aboard, and I lay with my cheek pressed against the warm, grimy deck, my heart beating rapidly, not from this exertion, but from happiness. Once belowdecks, Chuckler and I set out for the gal ey and a cup of hot coffee and conversation. We walked in and sat down, just as the last soldier who had been aboard this transport was rising to leave. He looked down at us as we sipped the coffee from thick white mugs. “How was it?” he said, jerking his head shoreward. “Rough,” we answered, mechanical y. Then Chuckler spoke up, “You mean Guadalcanal?” The soldier seemed surprised. “Of course I do.” Chuckler hastened to explain. “I wasn’t being wise … I meant, had you ever heard of the place before you got here?” His astonishment startled us. An idea was dawning, gladly. “Y’mean …”
“Hel , yes! Guadalcanal. The First Marines—Everybody’s heard of it. You guys are famous. You guys are heroes back home …” We did not see him leave, for we had both looked away quickly—each embarrassed by the quick tears. They had not forgotten.

1
The glory was gone out of it now. Gone was Guadalcanal. Gone was the valor, the doggedness, the wil ingness to let the jungle pick our whitened bones. We were spent, fit only for the Great Debauch stretching gaudily ahead in Melbourne. Say a requiem for camaraderie, mourn the departed fel owship that had bound us—officers and men—from the Carolina coastal marsh to the last panting lunge over the side of the President Wilson. It was dead. They took us first to Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides, where we arrived on Christmas Eve, each to receive a lol ipop from the chaplain, while Lieutenant Ivy-League gladdened the hearts of his superior officers with our cigars—and there, for three weeks, they gave us the manual of arms and practiced that portion of their code which admonishes the officers to remember that as he would not mistreat his dog, so he should not abuse his enlisted men.
Then they took us to Australia.
A happily blaring band played us onto the docks at Melbourne. It was our first sight of the Land Down Under, for we had been belowdecks since leaving Espíritu, driven there by a filthy storm in the Tasman Sea. We grinned at the band, and suddenly every one of us knew it was going to be al right. I passed a red-haired WAAF and exchanged smiles with her, detecting in her gladsome eye a second hint of the good times to come. They bundled us onto a train and got us rol ing. We crowded to the windows. Then everyone began to shout and whoop, for the most astonishing thing was happening. The route was lined with women—cheering, hugging themselves and each other, dancing up and down, blowing kisses, extending to the United States First Marine Division the fairest welcome. The train halted at Richmond, a suburb of the city, and we were herded into a fenced compound reminiscent of a cattle pen. On the other side of the fence were more girls, squealing, giggling, waving handkerchiefs, thrusting hands through the fence to touch us. Suddenly we were beside ourselves. We had not seen a woman since New Zealand, seven months before. Then they opened the gate.
“Commm-panee! Tenn-shun! Forrr-rd harch!” We stepped out grinning, slouching, our rifles slung—right past the girls. In al that moving column of faded light green there was nothing to suggest the military. So were born the Lotus-Eaters. We were mildly surprised to find ourselves marching into a stadium. It was the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. Here were our quarters, double-decked bunks stretching up the cement steps in tiers. They had removed the benches, replacing them with our bunks, so that the effect was one of a huge horseshoe, from which sprang row on row of thin spidery structures—and this enclosing a large circular green field. We were to live out of our packs. We slept in the open, unprotected save by a sort of quarter roof above us. Rain whipped by winds to our exposed front would not fail to wet us. But who was to complain? Stil less, who was to care about such trivial inconvenience on this first day of our return to civilization; who would upbraid the unadulterated good fortune which had quartered us in the Cricket Grounds—almost in the heart of the city—while the other regiments, the Fifth, Seventh and the Eleventh Artil ery, sulked in the suburbs? The city was ours, to be tasted almost nightly. We had not earned it; we had rather won it: our Regimental Commander had flipped the lucky coin with the chiefs of the Fifth and Seventh. Of al the regiments, ours—the First—was in the most advantageous position for the Great Debauch.
Discipline, already dissolved in the delicious squeals of the girls, al but disappeared that night. We had received part of our six-months’ arrears of pay in Australian pounds, but we had been issued no clothing; we stil wore our disheveled dungarees.
Yet, perhaps a third of the Regiment prowled the streets of Melbourne. I was out alone—Runner, Chuckler, Hoosier and the rest were either on guard or unwil ing to risk it.
The exhilaration of that night! At first I thought that it was my strange uniform and deep sunburn that marked me out for curiosity. But soon I came to realize that there was something more: I was the deliverer in the land he has saved. The smiles and winks of the Melbourne crowds assured me of it; the street-hawkers, too, with their pennants—“Good on You, Yank. You Saved Australia”—told me it was so. It was adulation and it was like a strong drink. I took it for a triumph and soon regarded every smile as a salute and every Melbourne girl as the fair reward of the sunburned deliverer. The first was Gwen.
We met in a milk bar. Strange place for a marine with every appetite athirst after seven months of abstinence, but the pubs of Melbourne closed at six o’clock, and I did not know then that the hotels continued to serve drinks for a few hours thereafter. I had marked her the moment I entered the place, and had seen the interest in her eyes. But now, as I sat alongside of her and drank a milk shake, she feigned indifference. I did not know what to say. So I asked her the time. She glanced pointedly at the watch so plain on my wrist, at the clock above my head, and said, “You’re a Yank, aren’t you?” Her words could not have been more exciting if she had said, “Let’s go up to my room,” for it mattered only that she should speak to me.
“Yes,” I said, “we’ve just come from Guadalcanal.” Her eyes went round as she answered, “Have you, now? That must have been terrible.” So it went, polite words, formal words, words without meaning, but words alive with the cal of sex—words converging on the result, so that in the end, after stops at hotels here and there, it was as though her first remark actual y had been, “Let’s go up to my room,” for that was where we went. There was the flickering light of a gas heater and there was the bed. But no more. Gwen instructed her brash visitor in the inscrutable ways of women: there would be no bel -bottom trousers in her young life, there would be no Yankee’s bastard to insult her declining years, there would be nothing—without there first being a ring on her finger. Pretending a gravity most difficult under the circumstances, I arose from that unrewarding couch and reinvested myself in my uniform and my dignity. And I left.
I closed the front door softly behind me and stepped into the silent night, rueful y reflecting on the American motion picture that has persuaded the world that al Yankee males are mil ionaires, cursing the conceit of womankind that is convinced there is no man living who cannot be bamboozled. Back in the center of Melbourne, outside the Flinders Street Station, the streets were moving with marines. If a third of our Regiment had been il icitly ashore earlier, now it must have been half. Some were stil bearded. It was a motley, reminiscent of that horde that had swarmed from the Guadalcanal jungle to fal upon the packs of the dog-faces. This time, they brandished bottles, hot dogs of the thick sausage-like Australian kind, meat pies, dishes of “icy cream”—whatever could be obtained from the al -night kiosks. There was singing, too. It seemed that overnight everyone had learned at least two verses of “Waltzing Matilda.” Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong